Is the dramatic increase in loan requests good news ?

I tend to only bid on/study loan requests > £90k. Saves a lot of effort. If a loan can be filled by autobid within a few hours, I don't bother looking at it.

You're not alone in terms of the API/algorithm route either. A personal project over the next few years will be to write some API-related software to try to automate a lot of the manual internet searching that makes up a lot of the due-diligence time. The idea is to speed up getting to the pertinent information. I half wonder if there may be commercial demand for such a tool, but then I start wondering about platform T&Cs, data ownership and getting sued, and that dampens my enthusiasm somewhat.   Will just build something for my own use/benefit first, and it it ends up being really good, I'll start figuring out if there's any way to commercialise it. Sure I probably won't be the only one to do this though... 

I wonder whether they are opening up the API precisely with a view that the whole platform may becoming an automated trading backbone !!!

As far as effort is concerned: for quite a while I've felt it it is too much effort for too little both financical and "intellectual" reward. When you could have a half decent dialogue with a borrower through Q&A not only was the due dil better, but there was just more reason to be interested.  This kind of offset the amount of time required which lets face it was probably always greater than the return justified. Like others have said, I tend to look at only the larger loans now (possiblity of marginally better rate, fill a bit slower, potential for some Q&A) and maybe some of the C- loans to see whether they look like safer houses than their ratings suggest: but since mmay of those are filled within 3 microseconds of listing......

Most of the time I spend logging into FC thse days is to see whether there is any bad news on any of my existing, to trim and sell a few loans, and only as an aside dip into current loan offerings. More loans should be more opporunity to get diversification/increase lending, but strangely it is having completely the opposite effect for me: too many, filling too soon, no good due dil opportunity, loans filled before you can get to assessing.

I'd rather spend my time assessing a much smaller batch on TC and invest more.

Similar here - ignore the smaller loans as they fill too quickly and with low rates. Spend a few minutes doing DD - there are enough other loans / P2x sites that there's plenty of other options if a loan doesn't inspire confidence for whatever reason.

I think FC are looking to get a couple of things from opening up the API: a cluster of Apps that will make using FC more attractive and some ideas on how to develop the FC sight.

Both of these they get for nothing just by offering access to the API.

One of the first things I was hoping to do with the API was to set up some kind of email alert for promising loans - could be C-, large loans, asset backed, high rate with 1 day to go etc.

I just wish my IT skills were sufficiently up to date to think about making use of it. Would be interesting to understand what might be involved in writing apps to it. For a start, what language ? Unfortunately my IT skills are a) rusty b) limited to "non IT" applications (think embedded software).

I'm going to be using Groovy and building my own web-app control pages in Grails to overlay calls to the API. I see it as a good opportunity to hone my fledgling Java skills and strike out into Groovy Grails. Having said this, any language that allows you to build and send http requests would do.

It will be interesting to see what kind of apps become available (possibly I will end up building whatever I do into one), but when it comes to using any third party app, there is a question of trust, as you will certainly have to enter your FC username, password and token number to use it. The token makes it secure, as I'd expect this to constantly change. However, if I were going to use a third party app, I'd want assurances my credential were just going to be sent to the API, not stored.

Additionally, there are potential data ownership issues. Not so much for building something to bid on new loans, but more so around building monitoring tools and analytics to track existing loan books. There is a lot of scope for automating this kind of tracking - particularly around running google searches for adverse news on companies you have lent to, and applying contextual matching/analytics to the results. This is something in which I'm extremely interested - down to knowing the potential tool I'd use. However, it's one thing to build this for yourself, but making it available to others presents issues around data ownership and borrower privacy. Potentially, these are solvable, but I figure I'd be better off building something first before deciding if I have a tool of potential use to others that makes it worthwhile enough to attempt to navigate the legalities. At the end of the day, this is why I think FC are placing the 30 day re-request rule that MRC_London is referring to. To run analysis of loan books efficiently would allow each borrower name to be stored in a central repository so you only have to make API calls once for each borrower (I'm thinking to places such as Companies House, who have a paid-for API). The 30 day rule when applied to individuals is only a bit of a hindrance, but what it does do is prevent is a third party from building up a database of FC borrower companies via the API. Personally, though, I think this is a bit of a grey area. At the end of the day, if you have lent money to a company, you should really have the right to be able to track and monitor the loan you've made. If third party tools exist to facilitate this, then I think you should be able to use them. Just my tuppence worth...

+1 !