Zopa offline

Bit weird - on trying to login it asked me where my investment in zopa was from - I said savings (technically this was not really correct and I was concerned why it asked) it let me in and I can see that its back up - for now....

The reason it gave for asking the question was money laundering but to be honest if that was the case how does me answering the question as savings clear money laundering scrutiny. I wonder if zopa is on the right planet these days ...

 

Every site is going to ask for source of funds. FCA demands.....

Problem is, mine go back so far and via so many savings accounts and I have no records now for these past years.

In a mix-up with FC at the moment over this. there is some discussion on an FC thread.

Interesting notion, makes sense to me as a non banker, the only thing that springs to mind is how does Zopa stop someone from sending funds in from anywhere in the world so perhaps the FCA requires all accounts to be vetted from a Uk standpoint. Also what may be relevant is that in order to have a Zopa don't you have to be a UK citizen anyway from an ISA perspective at least. Wasn't there a US zopa at one time in the past.

I am an early adopter, getting on in years as well, so can't remember what I had to do to get a zopa account - it was over 10 years ago but I seem to remember there wasn't any paperwork involved - mind you I've opened loads of bank accounts where there is relatively little if any at all paperwork. In order to fund zopa I had to have a bank account but not sure it had to be a UK one though .

I'm sure someone in the know will be along soon to put more clarity onto this interesting issue.

Well of course they do, for completeness. In terms of effectiveness, I'm still baffled though! I'm sure there's something I'm not getting, that's the usual explanation  

I used to convey properties in the UK so money laundering was a big deal - property was definitely the money-laundering device of choice for certain groups at one time. They used to turn up with carrier bags of cash to buy a £100,000 property (!) so the introduction of the original money-laundering legislation came as a great relief, especially to the accounts department who were understandably nervous about walking to the bank carrying so large a sum.

The law partnership who employed me took the view that funds transferred electronically from a UK financial institution had already been vetted by that financial institution in accordance with UK law and were a) therefore "clean" and b) not investigatable by us in terms of provenance and/or cleanliness. 

I know things change - this was going back 10 years or so, but I honestly can't see how Zopa, for example, can contribute anything meaningful to the process when the funds are all moved in electronically. Except on the question of foreign transfers, which aju raised. This is certainly a bit of a murky area, laundering-wise. I suppose Zopa only accepts transfers from UK-based financial institutions?

Once funds are in the system though, being transferred around electronically, provenance is impossible to establish for any individual financial institution. I can see the point of monitoring and reporting the size and frequency of cash deposits of course.

Zopa asking me where my ISA funds are coming from is about as much use as USA immigration control asking visitors to confirm that the purpose of their trip is not to assassinate the President

Once again the web site is down,how do they expect to attract business when the site is either very slow or not working.It is high time that the management bought in a quality IT firm to sort this mess out.I will not be investing any more money till this mess is sorted out.

Yup. 500 error consistently at 8.20 am. 

Saw your post and tried again. Still can't get on. Tried clearing cookies and cache, still no joy.

This is the first time I've had this problem. I've usually been able to get on when other people were repoorting difficulties recently.