Getting started - or not.

That presumes a single rotation.  If all orders are fulfilled and it goes round the loop a second time they get 5 hits to your 1.  So if you're both trying to deploy £1,000 in a single loan even if we rotate round in £20 chunks they'd get there with 5 fewer loops through the investor base than you.

I agree, it's algorithm is too primitive and too much happens in parallel which is causing clashes and race conditions.  This new release aims to build upon AI to improve it and fix those issues for the few who do appear to fall through the cracks with the current setup.

Life is not fair, and no system however you look at it is going to be fair to everyone and the more complex and the less understandable you make it the less fair it will be perceived to be and there are plenty of examples on other platforms where in an attempt to be fairer to one section of lenders they have discriminated against another or made the queue system so complex that it is hard to fathom what is actually happening and people walk away. I have been through is with Zopa where they weighted their queues to new lenders with new money and thus discriminated against long term investors who were reinvesting their income, and I am suffering from it now with Bondora where I have gone from having my income automatically reinvested within hours to having to manually bid in a riskier market in order to prevent a cash mountain being built up because the automatic system is barely picking up a loan a week.

The simplest most transparent system and thus the least unfair has to be a basic queue that allocates loan parts on a first come first served basis to the limit of of a lender's requirement within the limit of their available funds, with a people joining the queue in the order that they expressed a preference for the loan with the person staying at the front of the queue until their requirement is filled or they run out of cash. Yes there will be perceived unfairnesses if people are have large sums available to invest or have multiple accounts to invest through but manipulating the queue to combat this turns a perceived unfairness into actual discrimination.

Rotating through the queue based on the lowest quantum of loan part is patently ridiculous. Transpose it to a filling station, the lowest quantum the filling station sell is a litre, I drive up to the pump with the intention of filling my tank with 40 litres and I have the cash to do so, however because someone has driven in behind me the pump restricts me to a 1 litre which I have to pay for then drive out and back round to the end of the queue and start all over again and each time I do this there are potentially more new people sat in the queue in front of me so I never know when I am going to actually get my 40 litres as I have idea of how big the effective queue will be.

When it comes to automated platform bidding i.e. a platform wide AI based on global variables, then the initial queues for each loan need to be generated completely randomly from those lenders whse AI settings match the loan and with no reference to any times or monetary values. Subsequent to the initial generation of the queue lenders are added in the order that they show an interest in the loan. 





 

The issue of multiple accounts is a red herring, as each account must be dealt with individually regardless of who is managing it and even if you do know in detail why a person is managing multiple account and can thus discriminate between someone who is managing accounts for multiple individuals or multiple accounts just for themselves, otherwise you end up discriminating again. 

Life may not be fair but that doesn't mean I should accept a system that is open to abuse.  The simplest and least open to abuse system would be random lottery of those with funds available at point of sale on the aftermarket, and in many ways that would be fairer than any queue based system.  In your own example you start deviating from the "simple" queue when the loan is first listed, but that's just one scenario where inequality and abuse will set in.

I do somewhat regret starting this debate

AC doesn't support any of those principles in particular nor are we saying we'd heavily weight the markets.  If someone came on to the platform with £100 and all their cash had to be deployed before a HNW with £1m already invested in our platform could get a loan unit on the aftermarket then that wouldn't be fair either.  I can understand the giving that new £100 lender a small helping hand, say a 10% greater chance on the aftermarket, to get their first £100 deployed or if one lender chooses to focus on a handful of loans by only investing in them then giving them a small helping hand over someone just spreading their funds across as many loans as possible.  But it would only be small tweaks to the natural order not anything like the Zopa system as it's been described.  Or perhaps lenders we want to give a helping hand to can invest in £110 chunks whereas others invest in £100 chunks, whatever it is.  Given we can split loan units arbitrarily that becomes practical.

I can't tell you what the rules will be today but I can by the time the system launches and I will happily divulge the way the system works and the way in which we try to balance things.  A queue is just as arbitrary a solution as any other and I can't see the benefits it brings *except* that it's simple to understand and explain conceptually.  That is a big positive but not if it breaks the workings of the system and alienates users as they can't get their funds deployed due to people gaming the system.