Out for now

90% of my feedback was focussed on removing what I considered to be "noise" from various pages, or stripping them down and getting them focussed on the main element of each page:-

Remove redundant / repetitive information.
Remove anything that moves / changes size (particularly if caused by irrelevant user input like use of a mouse wheel).
Limit different colours unless they add something.
Limit links.
Refactor pages such that multiple links / pieces of text are only presented once rather than multiple times.
Make better use of screen real-estate.

None of which is directly related to the AC site specifically or finance in general.  IMHO the above are just good design approaches.  If followed they minimise distraction and help the user to spend more time focussing on what's actually important to them.

Most of the rest of it was about bugettes experienced in the tutorial.  Only one bit was directly related to the product / platform, and that was how it wasn't immediately obvious how to best to use the different accounts and the QAA / the difference between directly investing in the QAA and using the sweep.

John, of course I get your point .

Crabby, I also get your point, equally you could ask whether somebody who has only ever had a Post Office account should be using a platform like this.  Perhaps Zopa or FC's investment trust might be more appropriate?  Nothing any platform can do will completely remove the requirement for some sophistication on the part of the user, and some complexity on the part of the platform - buying index tracking funds on Fidelity's site can be a frustrating experience.

Note that I deliberately did not read Chris' explanation prior to providing my feedback.  I wanted to approach it with fresh eyes. The contrast between what he told me ahead of time (unread by me), and the feedback I provided, might be interesting in and of itself.

Of course, your mileage may vary, no apologies here for being an "ex-IT in IB guy" .

Lastly, my get out clause.  I've been on the platform for less than a day.  I retain the right to completely change my mind at a later date .

Well I have read all the messages and i get the principle... but like others need bit more clarification.

Cash account equals no risk immediate access.
QAA equals low risk 3.75% interest rate and immediate access under normal market conditions. Also immediate deployment if cap not reached.
GBBA is like a notice account at 7% and maybe not immediate deployment. (but can have funds swept into QAA if they are idle)

But is GBBA higher risk then QAA?

And most importantly what is the average notice required to cash out GBBA funds? (again lets assume normal market conditions).

Finally any idea on length of time for GBBA deployment?

Cash account is just a holding account, so your funds are held as cash in the client money account and are not deployed or invested in anything.

QAA is immediate deployment (cap allowing), immediate diversification into every loan held within that account, immediate withdrawal (in normal market conditions), provision fund protected, and a portion of your funds held in cash which both lowers the chance of loss of those funds and in aggregate facilitates the immediate withdrawal function.  Has priority buy and sell on the market to facilitate liquidity but we try and keep market disruption because of this as small as possible.

MLIA allows you to pick and choose which loans you invest in yourself, reviewing each loan's details and setting a buy instruction in those you're interested in.  You don't need to have funds available to cover all your buy instructions nor do loan units need to be available at that point in time.  The system will buy loan units for you as funds and availability allow, so you don't need to micro-manage each transaction.  No provision fund protection, can only withdraw cash at the rate the market will buy loan units off of you.

All trades use a bottom up allocation so loan units being sold are divided equally amongst all users trying to purchase, with any excess beyond someone's targets or available funds being divided equally amongst the purchasers.  If allocations per user are less than £1 then they are distributed in £1 chunks at random amongst all purchasers.  So there's no gaming of the system and all lenders get to deploy funds into loans at roughly the same rate.  There's also no primary and secondary market to worry about, there's one market with two lists of loans - those that have already drawn down and those that are in our pipeline.  Set your targets, fund your account, the system will do the rest to deploy your funds as availability allows.

GBBA is an automatic investment account that effectively sits on top of the MLIA.  It places buy and sell orders on your behalf to deploy your funds into loans that match its criteria (as published on the website) and adds a provision fund on top to help protect you from defaulted loans.  The PF is currently a bit on the small side (due to account growth) but is growing steadily and is on top of the normal asset security.  GBBA is currently >98% invested cash deployed and with the loans drawing down in the next couple of weeks should end up being 100% deployed.  New investors will require new loans to draw (or availability of existing loans on the market) in order to deploy funds but that is the same as all accounts except the QAA which is cap limited instead.

GEIA is the same as GBBA but invests in a different set of loans.  Because of the narrower remit and recent changes to government policy it is harder to deploy your cash at the moment with it being >85% deployed on average, skewed against more recent investors.  There are a couple of green loans coming up that will help with this but the drawdown dates are more difficult to predict and less frequent.  Because of the slower account growth more recently, due to the fewer green loans coming through so rate of cash deployed is lower, the provision fund is at a healthy level and again sits on top of the asset security.  That same pent up demand does mean more rapid exits are possible as there is demand from both the GEIA and MLIA.  GEIA has a level of buy priority over MLIA in green loans (as an account it will take, very roughly, 75% of available loan units compared to 25% for MLIA).  We will also, on occasion, segregate the market giving explicit allocations to the MLIA and GEIA in order to guarantee a larger allocation to the latter in those loans (e.g. £300k released to GEIA, £100k to MLIA).

We're currently testing a new diversification algorithm that will be released for the GBBA and GEIA that will automatically diversify your invested funds across the full range of loans held in the account by swapping loan units with other investors in the account.  The existing system works well enough when there are loans available to trade but is deliberately not very aggressive in its operation to minimise transactions, as historically it rebalanced the accounts a lot more aggressively and filled up people's statements.  The new system uses a complex genetic algorithm where the number of trades and overall diversification of the account's portfolio are used as scoring mechanisms, so it tries to optimise both to give the most diversification in the fewest trades possible.  It's slow and uses a lot of CPU power but can be told to be much more aggressive and will run periodically throughout the day to rebalance everyone's portfolios as needed.

This will still need loan availability to allow lenders to deploy new funds but will then achieve diversity much more rapidly as those deployed funds are spread across the other lenders.  It may also allow us, in time once the algorithm is proven, to allow the account to over expose lenders in an initial trade (treating the 20% maximum into one loan as a global characteristic instead of individual) and then relying on the diversification algorithm to trade amongst lenders to rapidly bring individual accounts back under that threshold.  No immediate plans on that though.

The new diversification algorithm is working in our test environment but needs integrating into the live site in a way that doesn't impact performance so is probably a week or two away.  Will keep everyone posted.

For the time being, Ive added chris latest explanatory info post to the useful info thread so we can find it again

They are not actually contradictory but refer to two different processes. AC loans are initially filled by underwriters, private, institutional or the QAA, a process we dont see. Once funded the loan draws down, the borrower gets the cash & a portion is then released to retail investors, either directly or through the GBBA/GEIA if applicable. Chris is detailing the retail process, the guide the more the general process. All retail investment is through an automated SM not the invisible Primary market

Actually option 3 is what I've got set and it not a disaster at all. It covers you if you are forgetful.

£100 in cash account doesn't disappear- it is in cash account but earning interest from QAA. If option 2 is chosen then cash would not earn interest.

I suspect that it is a compliance issue that you have to choose to put funds into QAA.