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Post by stevefindlay on Jul 15, 2016 12:57:01 GMT
Suggested improvement from a new investor: as the loan parts are small (I believe such diversification is attractive to many investors) it looks like it may take some time to become fully invested. To save frequent checking of the account it would be helpful to receive a confirmation email from BM once full investment is achieved, prompting a further funds transfer if so desired. shuff27 Love this suggestion. We will add it.
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fp
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Post by fp on Jul 15, 2016 14:00:41 GMT
Suggested improvement from a new investor: as the loan parts are small (I believe such diversification is attractive to many investors) it looks like it may take some time to become fully invested. To save frequent checking of the account it would be helpful to receive a confirmation email from BM once full investment is achieved, prompting a further funds transfer if so desired. Got to say, thats a great idea, I've been logging in 3 times a day and coming away with a disappointed face every time! Saying that, I've been allocated a few more loans today so can maybe afford an extra mouth full of guinness next weekend
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 15, 2016 16:50:23 GMT
Three suggestions for improvement.
1) Reducing drag of un-invested funds
When I manage my own loans on other platforms, I will usually choose to accept a lower diversification spread when that is necessary to remain fully invested, then I diversify later.
You could significantly reduce the drag from un-invested money if you did something similar by letting me select a higher allocation limit - e.g. 10% - to apply whenever I have un-invested money, then spreading the loan between more of your lenders later to achieve a 1% allocation target in the longer term. Extra complexity for you to administer re-allocation of loans, but increased returns for lenders.
2) Improved loan information
I appreciate your concern about sharing full details of the platforms you use. But you are asking us to trust totally in your modelling and risk assessments without the benefit of enough history to statistically justify your estimates and models. As a compromise to give us a slightly better feel of what we are exposed to, would you be prepared to publish a list of the platforms where you have the largest holdings? Something like the following table buried in your statistics section would give those of us who care a far better feel of our exposure:
These are the platforms with the largest holdings of our loans by value on 1st July 2016 (hypothetical example) Value Platform 18% Market invoice 13% Funding Circle 12% Saving Stream 9% AJ property investments (a specialist property bridging lender and definitely not just a bloke we met in the pub) 49% spread across 8 other platforms
3) Restructure the platform documentation.
I opened my account today to hold alongside my other P2P investments, thanks to the positive discussion on this forum. But I learnt nothing but generalities from wading through the reams of documents scattered randomly around your platform. Just assertions ad nauseam about returns and risks justified only by your own models and estimates. If it was not for the 5 pages of discussion in this post I would not have persevered. Please look at your platform documentation critically through the eyes of a lender. Your audience has three types of questions: a) Marketing for those new to P2P. One document on your front page and no more, covering P2P in general and P2P risks. b) Your platform unique selling point. Two or three paragraphs and no more outlining what you do that is different. Your unique selling point should be about 20 times shorter than the plague of repetitive boastful waffle currently cluttering up the site. If you have not persuaded someone to invest in the first two paragraphs they are not going to invest. c) How to use the platform. The factual operational detail that is currently missing should be in your FAQ section in place of the current marketing hype. The missing detail is too long to list. Here are a few obvious examples to give you the flavour: I have so far failed to find anything about how manual investing operates compared to auto investing. Under what circumstances do you charge 2% for withdrawals? What does the 'borrower type' mean on the loans list? What is the difference between a loan reference and a "receiv refere" in the loans list? Is one of these the same as the "Investment Reference Number"? Why is the asset security a padlock? What is the clock symbol on investment status? Why does my current return of 7.63% show as half full on the dial behind the number? Why does the time for withdrawal depend on my total investment, rather than the amount I am withdrawing, and why is that information not in the FAQ on withdrawing money? It was buried in some other document that I can no longer find.
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 15, 2016 18:37:21 GMT
david42 , with the greatest respect, I think you're suffering with the same thing that struck me when I tried to trust BM enough. I think with BM, if you're a seasoned P2P lender, it's difficult because you feel so out of control and blind to where your money is going. BM is useful alongside the other platforms I use because: - I do not have time to do sufficient due diligence on the loans I invest in. My loan diversity and platform diversity is limited by the amount of time I have available. I would like to reduce my time investment while increasing my P2P exposure. - A common mode risk for me is that I am choosing all the loans I buy. BM will choose a different set of loans which gives me diversity of risk assessment. - I mainly see BM as a filling the diversity hole left in my portfolio by my shrinking RS 5 year holding, with much better accessibility, less management effort and hopefully slightly better rates.
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jonah
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Post by jonah on Jul 16, 2016 20:49:55 GMT
A quick question... Does BM (now you have a board you have to have an abbreviation! ) charge its fee for loans in default?
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ben
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Post by ben on Jul 16, 2016 20:58:14 GMT
My reading is that they charge on what you have invested so what you get back does not matter in relation to fees.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Jul 17, 2016 7:37:25 GMT
MOD Comment: A dedicated board is coming soon... paul123 Ok- thank you. Also, please can I thank you (and the other moderators) for setting up this forum. I think it is a great opportunity for people to share their concerns, questions and comments publicly - thank you. Hopefully many platforms, like ourselves, will create better products and services as a result, which in turn will benefit our clients and investors. We would be interested to hear suggestions from this community for the pinned sub-threads for BondMason. As a starter for ten: - Investment Performance (hitting 7.0%+) - Initial Investment Allocation (getting filled in 28 days or less) - The problem with BondMason is... (suggestions for improvements) - Emergency problems - FAQs and Contact Us Steve, feel free to open as many new threads as you like on your dedicated board. If you'd like any of them "pinned" to keep them at the top then just request it via "Report Post" and one of us will get out the Mods toolbox
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Post by stevefindlay on Jul 18, 2016 8:40:33 GMT
A quick question... Does BM (now you have a board you have to have an abbreviation! ) charge its fee for loans in default? jonah (and ben) Currently we do charge fees on loans in default, but that's more by accident than design. That is, we've not actively considered this point. In practice any sum should be negligible 0-0.02% - i.e. 1% fee on 0%-2% of your overall portfolio - i.e. on a £10,000 portfolio, annual fees on defaulting loans are estimated at £2 (vs. a target net return of £700). On one hand, we probably work harder on defaulting loans, to make sure we know the status, the recovery process is being pursued correctly etc; on the other hand I can see why charging fees on the full amount of a defaulting loan may appear unfair. You raise a good point, and we will make sure we monitor it, to ensure clients are treated fairly.
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Post by stevefindlay on Jul 18, 2016 8:59:49 GMT
Three suggestions for improvement. 1) Reducing drag of un-invested funds 2) Improved loan information I appreciate your concern about sharing full details of the platforms you use. But you are asking us to trust totally in your modelling and risk assessments without the benefit of enough history to statistically justify your estimates and models. As a compromise to give us a slightly better feel of what we are exposed to, would you be prepared to publish a list of the platforms where you have the largest holdings? 3) Restructure the platform documentation. a) Marketing for those new to P2P. One document on your front page and no more, covering P2P in general and P2P risks. b) Your platform unique selling point. c) How to use the platform. david42 Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback, and writing a detailed post: (1) Reducing drag - we have something in the pipeline on this! Should be ready this month. (2) Improved loan information - I have a lot of sympathy for this. You may have seen my other comments on this issue - concerns with publicly disclosing the platforms, as the reader may assume that 100% of loans from each of those platforms are ok (verified in some way by BondMason). However, this isn't a final position for us, we will discuss it again in the office, and see if we can do something. Your suggestion is a good one. (3) Platform docs (a) New to P2P - you may like to see our new P2P Lending Guide (there's a link to this from our home page) (b) Unique selling point - this should be the 2 key points on our homepage landing area: "Effortlessly earn....(7.0%)" and "We spend hours every day sourcing investments from approved P2P Lending platforms (so you don't have to)" Perhaps we should expand / elaborate on this further. (c) How to use - all of your FAQs suggestions are good; and we will add them to the FAQs page over the next 24-48 hours. Thank you. Please feel free to email me with any other questions / concerns which we can answer and also combine into FAQs for the benefit of everyone invest@bondmason.com
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 18, 2016 10:32:09 GMT
(3) Platform docs (a) New to P2P - you may like to see our new P2P Lending Guide (there's a link to this from our home page) (b) Unique selling point - this should be the 2 key points on our homepage landing area: "Effortlessly earn....(7.0%)" and "We spend hours every day sourcing investments from approved P2P Lending platforms (so you don't have to)" Perhaps we should expand / elaborate on this further. (c) How to use - all of your FAQs suggestions are good; and we will add them to the FAQs page over the next 24-48 hours. Thank you. Please feel free to email me with any other questions / concerns which we can answer and also combine into FAQs for the benefit of everyone invest@bondmason.com Steve Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. I will look forward to the platform improvements. Sorry that my third point was ambiguous. Having got bored out of my mind spending two hours learning nothing from reading your repetitive performance boasts justified only by your own estimates, scattered throughout every section of your website, I am asking for a reduction of the quantity of what is currently on your website, to make room for the missing factual information in the FAQs. No way would I have invested if I had found your website before reading the far more informative real information on this forum. Sorry that I cannot list everything that you need to explain in your FAQs. I hope that the 10 questions I listed previously might get you started. You might then want to look critically at every icon or heading on every page and making sure it is fully self explanatory. As a more experienced P2P investor I realise my needs are more demanding and different from some of your audience - I have tried to suggest a logical approach that meets the needs of all of your target audience. David
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Post by housepriceanalytics on Jul 18, 2016 15:13:59 GMT
Anyone tried withdrawing funds from BM?
I registered hoping just to put in a trial £100, but minimum is £1000. I don't feel great putting £1000 into something so new, but at least would be assuring if I thought I could withdraw easily if needs be.
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Post by stevefindlay on Jul 18, 2016 16:07:03 GMT
Anyone tried withdrawing funds from BM? I registered hoping just to put in a trial £100, but minimum is £1000. I don't feel great putting £1000 into something so new, but at least would be assuring if I thought I could withdraw easily if needs be. housepriceanalytics We've had a very small number of clients withdraw funds - most have done so to test the system only! The way it work is: (1) They request a withdrawal from their dashboard (2) If there are sufficient uninvested funds, then the money is transferred back on the same day (3) If they need to request to liquidate their positions first, then it depends on how much they have invested before they can get their money back. £1-5k is usually liquidated and returned within 2-5 days. Please ask if you have any questions. Thanks, Steve
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david42
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Post by david42 on Jul 18, 2016 16:08:11 GMT
Anyone tried withdrawing funds from BM? I registered hoping just to put in a trial £100, but minimum is £1000. I don't feel great putting £1000 into something so new, but at least would be assuring if I thought I could withdraw easily if needs be. Today I did a test withdrawal of spare cash that took less than a day between my initial request and money sitting in my account. That included the time for an exchange of emails to confirm the destination account number. If you needed to liquidate loans first it would take a lot longer. I don't know about payments less than £1,000 either in or out.
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Post by eascogo on Jul 19, 2016 18:50:08 GMT
My £1,000 fully invested today, on day 7. Great improvement compared to a 3k invested early last month by a friend, that took 35 days to fully invest. How are other investors progressing?
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fp
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Post by fp on Jul 19, 2016 19:05:32 GMT
I had 1k in an account for my wife from Tuesday last week, that has bumped up today to around £820 invested from around £380 invested yesterday so that was a surprise if i'm honest.
I've pulled about 25% of my investment out of FC over the past week so I opened a BM account at around 12.15 this afternoon to trickle some in to that, I logged in at teatime to see if my initial 1k was showing in the account yet as it took 2 days to show when we opened my wife's account and £340 is already invested, so i'm fairly pleased to be honest.
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