Finished on the P2P forum?

Echo the above points Steve. Your input played a big part in my making an initial toe-dip in BM.

It would be a real shame to lose you completely. You are a valuable member of the P2P community.

Credit too for the way you've stood up, been patient and handled the inevitable flak from what was always going to be a difficult period in BM's evolution.

RS went downhill from the moment Westonkev left the company and there ceased to be a "presence" on the RS forum.

[mod hat off]

Steve, the dilemma is that no one communication strategy will work for eveyone, but only you can assess what works for your business based, in part, on a profile of the sort of people you want as investors.

I registered with BM soon after you launched as your business model makes a lot of sense to me, but never funded my account mainly due to what for me was the very off putting email demand reminder every 48 hours thereafter that I still needed to transfer funds to BM despite at no point me indicating that I intended to.  That was push communication at its very worst (and for which you did apologise in an email to me), but at the risk of reinforcing a point already made, came across as the arrogant big business approach.  (And because of this past arrogance, as I percieved it, all your emails are still automatically routed to my spam folder, and deleted 7 days after receipt, unread.)

At the other extreme is pull communication, where you answer specific email/phone questions only. However, in my eyes a platform engaging on a  forum such as this provides an "educational" service, whereby the questions asked and the answers / commentary given inform a wider picture as to the sort of business that is asking for investments. 

The origins of p2p are in the connecting lenders and borrowers at the zone of possible agreement, and to achieve this in any scale needed good and open communication, and zopa^TM astutely used their forum to tremendous advantage by in effect delegating in part the promotion of the platform to their users. Unlike some of their early competitors with a forum, zopa accepted their forum would at times be critical of them, and whilst responding to any false allegations, never hindered free discussion, good or bad. Only recently did zopa conclude hosting their own forum was not longer necessary, and the page their forum url redirects to still suggests this forum as an alternative.

I have not read every post on the BM board over recent weeks, but I'm not in the least bit surprised if the overal tone is critical, especially given the decision to dis-enfranchise existing investors who cannot reach the new minimum. As an outsider looking in, that again comes across as the arrogant big business approach, not a small scale customer centric approach.  I would have fully supported your decisions on the new minimum / fees for new investors in BM.

I, in common with I suspect many early p2p lenders, yearn for the smaller more human scale platforms that new entrants to the sector inevitably are, and mourn their growth towards the end goal of arrogant big business driven only by shareholder greed. That said, I accept the costs of regulatory compliance are such that small scale operators may struggle to create a viable long term business. 

Given where we are today, I'm not sure who BM view as their ideal future customer profile. If it is to be soley referals from IFA's then devoting attention to this forum is indeed pointless. It clearly isn't a mass market retail customer given the new mimimum, so advertising in the Daily Mail is probably not worthwhile. If, on the other hand BM is targetting a well educated, relatively wealthy retail audience, continuing to engage on this forum would seem sensible (the immediate outcry over the changes will likely soon die down).



For clarity a mimimum investment of any four figure or low five figure value in a pooled investment (i.e. with further inbuilt diversification) is not a barrier to me, nor is a predicted post fee yield of c. 6% pa.

 

Yes indeed, how true, I've noticed in the P2P forum that some people labour on a point to such an extent that I sometimes wonder why the platform bothers to answer. 

It rather reminds me of the SNP, they were given more powers and got their own parliament, they get more money per head than England, they had their "once in a generation" referendum, they were permitted to lower the referendum age to vote to 16 ect. ect. but still Sturgeon whines on with a vocal negativity .....

Great post.  

I've made a number of posts over the years of the 'cycle of a new p2p platform' whereby euphoria and excitement slowly morph to negativity. The minute a rep engages with this forum it is initially welcomed but then quickly goes sour as individual investors interpret engagement with this forum as meaning each and every individual question will be answered NOW and will result in a favourable personal outcome. 'lets have more loans' 'lets have less risk' 'lets have higher interest' etc etc and if these mutually contradictory demands are not all satisfied a populist revolt occurs and it gets personal eg. a few days ago directors having their integrity questioned.

Sadly you have trodden a well worn path and Assetz had this (but still engages), RS did as did SS, FC never did. Westonkev said it succinctly in one of his posts that the RS board questioned what benefit there was in engaging as it got to the point where the platform can appear to do nothing right. Sadly it's human nature not to post anything positive but rush to post something negative and i don't know what the answer is for that.

Whatever forumites say, RS, FC and SS survive perfectly well in the real world despite having become forum pariahs. Non forumites are routinely described as lemmings and yet outnumber forumites by whole orders and this forum is useful to those that use it but not critical for the platforms it talks about.

Yeh it'd be great if all platforms engaged but it is hard to see how a living, thinking human being with feelings could ever keep up without it impacting on their state of mind. Sad but inevitable. Moneything next.

Jack P