Reasons for slow lending in Z+?

Many thanks all, very useful.

- PM

I did email Z directly on the lending speed issue in Z+. Which to be fair now seems to be okay for me at least, since April 28th (which coincidentally was the day after I emailed them re the issue).

This is how they replied. 

My reading between the line is the higher than expected Z+ up take was the reason for the slower lending speed and they have now rebalanced the mix of Z+ loans Institutional v Retail loans to speed lending up.  I gather that from the term "rebalanced the situation" without reducing rates and doing so very quickly.

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Dear W35,

Thank you for your email and I appreciate your concern surrounding the recent congestion of new funds we have been experiencing in the new Zopa Plus account.

I can confirm that lending speeds had been relatively slow for the month of April due to a combination of our disbursal levels being lower than anticipated as well as experiencing a lot of new funding into the Zopa Access and Zopa Plus lending products. While we certainly looked to forecast the demand for these new products, we had no guarantee how popular they would become which made managing queue expectations particularly difficult. Hence why queue information has only recently been reinstated onto the lending pages at a product level. We are however confident that we have re-balanced the situation, without having to resort to a decreasing the forecast return on our products, and you should already have seen your funds begin to progress steadily through the queue once again, in time for May's start of month repayment run.

I hope this has answered your concerns, if you have any further questions please let me know.

Kind regards

Joshua Webb
Client Services

I commented over on the new money thread as follows regarding my recent £1000 lend which may be useful here as well.

I've now lent a £1000 into Zopa Plus by re-routing repayments from Classic and pre-safeguard. Initially using manual methods and later using auto tools as they came on stream.

A lower 5 figure sum took about 8 weeks to create enough (£1000 min) repayments, capital and interest, to start lending in Zopa Plus and my Acquired dates range from 13th - 19th May, some are still in W-pending (18th and 19th) but I'm happy with the lend rate - I guess new money will take a bit longer.

I'm happy also to know that should I want a £1000 cash it takes about 2 months without penalty, however, I have never removed any of my zopa investment since I started so not sure when I will need to use that method.

I should note that I had my £1000 by the 10th/11th May - I think.

that does seem fast - hopefully it won't be matched as long as one I had last week it seemed to be in matched for 3/4 days.

Isn't that the other way around?

The thread was about slow lending so I don't think there is insufficient demand from retail lenders they seem to be, or at least initially after the product was launched, exhibiting high demand the problem appeared to be that Zopa didn't have enough borrowers to match their funds, or quickly at least.

This may of course be redundant now as matching appears to be much faster although I seem to recall an average of 4 days compared to 1 day for the "safeguard protected" products.