DFL017 paid 12% interest (and some other non-12% loans)

Unfortunately the very open nature of p2p means that every single hiccup is highly visible to all of us in a way that isn't with conventional finance. It must be very stressful for people that are getting aerated - then leaving to go to whatever the current 'platform of the moment' is. Moneything was that platform, i've seen people are now turning on that one. So where next if we expect perfection? Given the flow of money into Lendy, I am not sure 'ordinary' investors share the negativity often seen here.

I am not saying we shouldn't highlight mistakes but i do get fed up with the assumption that any cock up is a conspiracy or a means to extract more money out of us.

Jack P

To be honest, the main issue here IMO is less the cock up and more the fact that rather than creating new transactions to correct the balance on the account they amended the old transactions.

No transaction logged against an account should ever be amended and I would hope that a company writing systems who focus on money should be aware of this. Not only is this incorrect procedure and amateurish it also royally f**ks things up for people who have already imported their transactions into 3rd party software for accounting purposes.

The corrections should either have been logged as negative interest or a correction on the account on the date the correction actually occurred.

Regardless of the SCALE of the problem, the problem is of Lendy's making, so it is their problem to solve.

As an analogy... suppose a supermarket has their tills programmed to print out a discount voucher from your next purchase. The next day, they realise that their computers had been programmed to apply the wrong amount of discount (e.g. a 12% of the amount you purchased rather than the 10% it had said on the promotional posters), so they retrospectively change the value of the discount vouchers that have already been printed.

For people who had already spent the vouchers before the mistake was corrected, they then claim that those people had walked out of the shop without paying for their purchases, and follow their usual procedures for people who don't pay in full for their purchases.


At the very minimum, I expect Lendy to waive enforcement of their normal procedures for negative balances that resulted wholly from their error. In particular I do NOT expect to receive a "please resolve negative balance" email. If I do, I will return it to them telling them to please resolve the negative balance of their own making.

I fully agree and stated this earlier in the thread.

Another point worth mentioning is the backdating of the entire interest run, paying the interest on the 1st of the month but inserting the payments in to the account transactions at 00:00am at the start of the last day of the previous month. This also changes already published figures and means that you can receive interest payments on the account which appear before the loan part was bought.

Example: On 31st January between 08:18 and 11:21, PBL150, 151 and 152 went live and I received some prefunded amounts. I received interest for those which was paid on 1st February but back dated in my transactions to 31st January, presumably at 00:00 but, as usual, appearing before all other transactions for that day. Consequently, the January interest for those loan parts appears in my transactions list before I actually purchased them.

I imagine that the inept programmer was intended to insert the interest payments at 00:00 at the start of the 1st of the month. Then at least the interest payment for a loan part could not appear before the  part was purchased. (Of course, the payments should not ever be inserted; they should be appended and date stamped with the date and time of the actual transaction.)

I suspect that this one-day error is also the cause of the extra day of interest which we receive on loan parts sold which were bought in a previous month:

• If a loan part is bought and sold within the interest month, the calculation is trivial and LfSS get it right (days of interest equals sale date minus purchase date).
• If a loan part bought within the interest month and is not sold, the calculation is trivial and LfSS get it right (days of interest equals days in month minus purchase date plus 1).
• If a loan part bought in a previous month is held for the entire interest month and not sold, the calculation is trivial and LfSS get it right (days of interest equals number of days in month).
• If a loan part bought in a previous month has been sold during the interest month then the calculation is trivial but LfSS get it wrong (days of interest should be sale date minus start of month date). The error is that their start of month date seems to be 00:00 on the last day of the previous month - the same error as the incorrectly inserted interest payments.

And yes, I did say the calculation is trivial in every case - because it is. It takes a special combination of numpty programmer and dumb tester to make a hash of such simple things.

I worked in mainframe design and development and then systems development between 1970 and 2012. I find it hard to believe that this floundering around in software has seen much involvement of real programmers and certainly not system testers. It looks much more like the work of graphics 'designers' who think they understand what goes on under the hood and are happy tinkering away on live systems.

I believe this was a bigger mess up then just paying 12% on non 12% loans. Numbers have changed in relation to people with only 12% loans and people like me with hardly any non 12% loans have seen the numbers changing.

I fear there is a cover up going on here and something more serious has gone wrong. I feel for the guys at Lendy who I got the impression were sweating buckets and working long hours correcting all the mistakes on a manual basis,one by one, in a mad panic.

Lendy will surely have to make a full statement because although they have said the interest was wrong they have not given any instructions about whether people should now jump to action negative balances. Presumably people were all square on Saturday and therefore able to sell their loan parts younger than 7 days and suddenly lendy stuff them with a negative balance and they are unable to act even though they reconciled all their accounts to the last penny.

FCA compliance looks a long way off to me ...

Maybe it's time to contact the Washington Post!