‘Changes’ category

Site maintenance tomorrow morning (24th January 2008)

Posted by Tristan at 12:20 pm

In a change to the planned maintenance of the 23rd, we’ll now be performing site maintenance on January 24th from 4am for around 5 hours. During this time, the site will be unavailable. Thank you for your patience and understanding while the work takes place and we apologise for the change around. If you have any urgent queries, please get in touch here contactus@zopa.com

Posted in Changes, General, Bugs and problems, Problems | No Comments »

Making Zopa even better in 2008

Posted by Tristan at 12:49 pm

So, 2008 kicked off rather relentlessly didn’t it? After launching in Italy just under a week ago, in the US at the end of last year and Listings in the UK, we’ve been non stop here in the UK planning all sorts of exciting things for the rest of the year and making Zopa even better.

Amidst all the serious stuff, we’ve also somehow found the time to create our own Facebook application. Called People Like You, it lets you compare your personality with other people, and shows you the people we know are like you. Simple really. And who knows, you may even find some interesting people like you to poke?! It might not help you get a loan as it’s really just a bit of fun, but if it helps more people discover Zopa and reap the benefits of peer to peer lending then all the better we think.

Whilst we’re on the subject, remember we also have an ‘official’ Facebook group and we’re thinking about setting up our own Page so you can help spread the word about Zopa. Then we’ll have real fans and everything.

Finally, a quick apology. We have been rubbish at keeping this blog updated when we’re busy. Noted and in hand so do get in touch if you think there’s anything you’d like us to post about.

Right, back to that serious stuff . . more on that soon.

Posted in Changes, New stuff, General, America | No Comments »

Zopa’s Getting Even Better

Posted by ThomasB at 12:19 am

But I’m afraid we’ll have to turn it off for a little while first.

Zopa will be off-line from 2pm to around 3pm.

Zopa will be off-line from 8am to 9am on Friday.

Zopa will be off-line from 8am to 9am on Monday.

We aren’t having system problems. The techies are being sent out to the countryside for meeting on Fri instead!

Posted in Changes, New stuff, General, Technology, Bugs and problems | 7 Comments »

New toys

Posted by Dave at 10:45 am

We’re just putting in a new release - which has some long awaited features for lenders.

In ascending order of importance…

Firstly we’ve replaced the existing lending summary screen with a new ‘profit and loss’ screen - called the All Time Lending Summary. This shows all the credits and debits to your account since you started lending at Zopa, along with the total amount you have lent out and received back from your borrowers. This screen combined with the ‘balance sheet’ view of My Zopa Today should give you a complete high level view of your financial standing at Zopa.

Secondly, we’ve introduced a My Statement screen. This screen shows a very detailed breakdown of every single transaction on your account over the last 30 days, and allows you to download calendar months worth of data in CSV format. There are still a few little tweaks to make to this screen, so it’s officially still in beta, but we hope it meets the requests of lenders who have been asking for the most detailed view of what’s going on with their accounts.

Finally, we have Auto Relending - done properly this time! This functionality will allow all Zopa lenders to set up the automatic relending of repayments back into a specified offer. You can choose to relend into any offer that has not been withdrawn, although by default the relending will be activated into any new offer you make. Of course, you can turn it off by going to ‘Current Offers’ and selecting ‘Relend’ from the drop down menu - putting you in control of your repayments.

It’s worth noting that if you turn this feature on, and have more than £10 in your holding account, it won’t immediately relend that money - but the first time a new repayment hits your account it will place the existing holding account balance plus repayment (in multiples of £10) into your selected offer.

Hope you enjoy the new functionality - please report any problems on the discussion board - cheers!

Posted in Changes, New stuff, Lenders | 2 Comments »

New release details

Posted by Dave at 1:21 pm

Just a quick post to let you all know what’s coming up in the next few days. The release is ready to go, but we’re holding off while we’re expecting a large amount of PR coverage - it’s just too risky to put a new release live at such an important time for us.

So - what’s included?

My Zopa Today
A new screen for lenders that will show you in one place where all your funds are at Zopa, how many borrowers you have, you current lending offers and any unfunded lending offers you have - think of it as your Zopa balance sheet.
From this screen you can rename your lending offers (a new feature), choose to edit your lending offers and transfer funds.

This screen will be the centre of the new lending screens - and will have more functionality added to it over the coming months as we introduce the remaining screens.

New Quick Lend screen
We want to make lending as simple and easy as possible - so we’ve redesigned the ‘Quick lend’ screen to help new lenders get to grips with Zopa and understand how it works.

The major innovation is a graphical indicator of how well your offer is priced across all markets against lenders offers, and borrowers matches. We think this will make it much easier for quick lenders to price in the Zopa - and get their money lent out at great rates quickly.

Capital Guarantee product for lenders
This might be a couple of days later (We’re awaiting final regulatory clearence, but the system is all built) - but we’re delighted to be able to offer an insurance product for lenders that guarantees your money back - no matter what happens with bad debts.

We know this won’t appeal to all our lenders, but we think that the option of a totally secure Zopa (subject to a small insurance premium) will make Zopa attractive to a new segment of consumers - which will benefit all Zopa members.

That’s all the front end changes - there are also the usual pile of behind the scenes stuff to keep Zopa up and running - and I hope you think that they’re improvements that have been worth waiting for.

Please let us know your thoughts either here, or in the discussion forums.

Posted in Changes, New stuff | No Comments »

New, improved Zopa: Now washes whiter!

Posted by Dave at 10:50 am

As you may know, we’ve been working away on a new look and feel for the Zopa website - and we thought it was about time we invited you in to give your views on where we’re ending up.

Below are a couple of mock ups of what the Zopa homepage and Lending homepage might look like - have a click through to see the full size images.

We’d love your comments, but hopefully you might find it interesting to read a little about where these designs have come from first.

Although we love the existing Zopa site, there are a lot of problems with it. We’ve found the graphical language and layout very constraining - for example the silhouettes are hard to bring to life. They’re supposed to represent our members, and the human side of Zopa, but they don’t do it very well - which means we have to use lots of copy to convey the humanity and warmth of Zopa. And no one reads copy online

Also, we only really have a way to represent data in a tabular format - and for many people that is hard to interpret - we need a way to show lots of data in a graphical format.

Another problem, familar to many weary lenders in particular, is that the site has had more and more crammed into it as we’ve added functionality over the last year or so - and it’s creaking at the seems. We’re simultaneously looking at making a lot of the site simpler and more useful - but it’s hard to do that inside the current, sprawling, design. (There’s a post coming on this soon!)

Finally, we wanted to remove the barrier between the active (transactional) pages, and the non active (brochureware) pages…and to make it easier for non members to see ‘inside’ Zopa.

So, when we sat down to come up with something better, we had a series of requirements. The new site would have to be:

• Open and transparent - allow anyone who visited Zopa to immidiately understand what was going on and what Zopa was about
• Simple
• More engaging and human, and something that showed our members better than the silouettes we’ve been using to date
• Expandable - it would have to work in the UK and the US, and allow for future expansion of the Zopa proposition

So what are the main changes we’re making?

Well, most obviously there’s a new look and feel to the site - hopefully it feels a bit more modern and grown up, and also makes it more obvious what we’re about - money and people. We’re introducing new colours to be able to distinguish different areas of the site: a purple for the (new) community area (blog, discussion board etc.) and blue for the signed in transactional area (We’re told blue is a credible financial services colour… )

The space at the top will be an interactive area where it will be possible to see what’s going on in the markets directly from the homepage - without joining or logging in - breaking down the barriers and letting visitors ‘play’ with Zopa before they join up.

We also have a new system for visualising our members - the little characters at the top of the home page are avatars that represent each and every one of our members, and will evolve to allow us to show specific groups and communities within Zopa.

Overall, we hope the new layout will be simpler to navigate, have less copy, fewer routes for people to travel down and generally be a worthy sucessor to the design that has seen us through our first 15 months.

What do you think?

EDIT: You can also join in the discussion over on the, very well named, Zopa discussion boards. Ta.

Posted in Changes, Brand, Design, Members | 10 Comments »

A Zopa lender writes (Second guest blog!)

Posted by 1020990 at 10:54 am

“1020990″ is a Zopa lender, and an active member of the Zopa discussion boards. No one knows what the numbers mean - a bit like Lost.

So how did this all happen!? Last time I looked, which still seems to be a far too regular occurrence, I’d racked up over 100 posts about Zopa here having only been bitten by the bug a couple of months earlier. Maybe I should blame Cliff for ever having mentioned the idea over on the Motley Fool. Alternatively, it may just be true what they say about mad dogs and English men given the excess of summer sun in recent days - even though that doesn’t normally coincide with Wimbledon!

Either way, at some unwittingly altruistic moment I promised the resident Zopa blogger (Zlogger entry anyone?) a few words on subjects that must apparently relate in some way to Zopa or P2P activities. After all, despite his appeal, I think there’s only been 1 guest blog post – so that makes this at least the second best of all time guest blogs at time of going to press!

Given that my experience of P2P activities is limited to that of ZOPA the possibility of an earth shatteringly innovative article is somewhat unlikely! However, the question “What bits of Zopa make you go ‘Doh’?” has been previously asked, so I’ve hopefully pulled together a few of the major sticking points that Zopa lenders are currently operating as judge, jury and executioner on, on the lenders discussion forum. As new website releases are still coming through, we’ll hopefully be able to have an influence; however slight; on the tweaks which happen. After all, “great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together”.

So with my IT knowledge limited to Excel macros and my biased position as a lender, I’m hoping the small things I picked up below are relatively minor rather than requiring fundamental redesign, but will if achieved please the majority. For those of you who frequent the bulletin boards you may well have seen some of these before but for those that don’t then hopefully they’ll add some food for thought, prompt discussion and hopefully some of those friendly people at Zopa can provide some feedback if possible, as well as likely delivery timescales if applicable:

• The Zopa Triangle - The (dead) zone where money disappears to from your holding account for an indeterminately long time when trying to lend to borrowers. Sometimes also known as Loans currently being processed – can we be provided with more information on this one area rather than just a top level amount?
• Remove all the scrollable boxes that are used in screens like “Offers to Borrowers” “Zopa Borrowers” etc. This is the 21st century - I have a 17 inch monitor I don’t need to only use 4 inches of it!
• Summary schedule of expected repayments due over the next 30 days and identifying where any bad debts may have arisen (are there any!?! ) A similar sort of thing is currently split out by lending offer but ideally an overall summary would be useful of payments received and expected.
• Electronic (automatic) withdrawal of money if required – currently contact with a person at Zopa is required. Automating would reduce the amount of human intervention required and therefore benefit Zopa’s costs, and please lenders!
• Lenders being able to sell their loans to other lenders on an exchange, for a rate agreed by both parties to allow lenders beset by unexpected issues to liquidate their loan portfolio

There’s so much other stuff which has been requested in one place or another. Above is hopefully a non-controversial snap-shot. I’ve pilfered the ideas from other people’s posts in the main so hopefully they don’t mind and I know Zopa have responded on at least the bottom one which is at least a year away – but at least they know about it!

I’m sure some of you will be cynical but a number of the requests that have been posted on the discussion boards have subsequently been implemented. Automated re-lending of a sort is now available, details regarding the expected returns on lending contracts etc. After all, the best way to eat the elephant standing in your path is to cut it up into little pieces.

So feel free to comment here or even better, come and join some of the other Zygotes, Zucchinis, Zebras and Zebedees (thanks Justin!) on the discussion boards.

Posted in Changes, Lenders, Guest blogger | No Comments »

A delicate balancing act

Posted by Dave at 1:20 am

The discussion board has been busy since we announced the introdution of fees last week, and I thought it might be worth linking to a an Economist article that seemed relevant.

The article is about pricing decisions in two sided markets - of which Zopa is one. The problem arises when a company is trying to appeal to 2 sets of potential consumers, for example:

Microsoft, for instance, knows that everyone who buys its Xbox 360 adds to the console’s appeal to independent game publishers. The games these publishers conjure up then make the console more attractive to other customers. This makes Microsoft’s pricing decision tricky indeed. How much it charges one side of the market—people who play games—has a knock-on effect on demand on the other—people who develop them—which has, in turn, an indirect impact on the first side. This … is more difficult than “setting the price of toothpaste”.

We have a similar problem - if we only charge borrowers (our initial model) then we end up with unattractive rates for borrowers…and hence unattractive rates for lenders. If we only charge lenders, then we end up with unattractive rates for borrowers. You see the problem?

We don’t know for sure that we’ve got the right answer (Indeed the intensity of debate suggest we might well not have), but we might have to suck it and see. The Economist admits “Economists are still learning how two-sided businesses set their prices, and they still don’t know where the see-saw should settle.” For once, I feel like an economist.

Posted in Changes, Members | 1 Comment »

A fee in our ear.

Posted by Dave at 3:19 pm

As you might have noticed, we’ve generated some passionate debate over at the discussion board about the introduction of fees.

You can read for yourself the pro’s and con’s in the lengthy thread (Our CEO, Richard Duvall, has also written a reply that’s worth reading), but I wanted to say a little bit about what we’ve learnt from this already.

I guess what we’ve been very forcefully reminded of is that fact that we have a community of members who have spent a lot of time learning about Zopa and how it all works. When we abruptly changed the way Zopa is going to work in the future, we upset a lot of people.

Thankfully, we had the discussion board up and running so we now know exactly how upset people are, and we’ll think carefully about how we move forward with the fee, taking on board everything people have said.

It’s interesting to think about how we’d have done it differently, with hindsight. I think it would work something like this:
1) Take several small groups of Zopa lenders and borrowers (particularly active lenders) to talk about possible fee models and the pro’s and con’s of each - aim to actually develop a working assumption about what model to use in conjunction with those members.
2) Open this up to the community on the discussion board, explain how we got to the fee model, offer up alternatives, and maybe ask people to discuss and vote.
3) When we have a clear answer, agreed by the community, give people a lot more warning about when we’d introduce the change, so that there is plenty of time for people to adjust to it coming.
4) Stay close to the community after the fee has been introduced, and make sure it’s what people expected.

To be fair to us, we did do some of 1) and we’re trying to do 4) as well as possible (although we failed on Friday afternoon), but 2) and 3) we missed out completely.

We’ve learnt a lesson about the importance of community - thank you for that.

Posted in Changes, New stuff, Members | 1 Comment »

Things to make and do

Posted by Dave at 7:35 pm

Phew. Well, that took rather longer than we wanted, but now we’ve picked up all the boxes and plugged them back together, so the Zopa goodness is back online, and better than ever.

So, what was it all about?

Let me break it down for you. Firstly, something of interest to everyone is that we’ve changed the way the matching engine works - click here to read a previous post about it. The upshot is that lenders will now receive exactly the rate they offer into the markets, and borrowers will pay a blended rate of all their lenders rates. This should give lenders better control over their returns, and borrowers a better rate for borrowing.

Now, for lenders we been polishing up the table that shows you the detail of your lending offers to give you more information about how your offer sits in the market. Have a look at the new and improved version…

You’ll notice 2 new columns - Offered Lower and Match Speed. Offered Lower shows you what percent of the money in that market is offered at a rate lower than your rate - a high percent means your offer is relatively un-competitive, a low percent says you’re near the head of the queue to get your money lent out.

Match Speed gives an indication of how fast your money is likely to get lent out at the rate you’ve chosen. It’s based on comparing your rate to the previous 100 matches in the market. If it’s Low, you might want to reduce your rate to get your money lent out faster, if it’s High you should see you money get lent out rapidly - which will make everyone happy!

You’ll also notice if you click on the ‘mkt’ link at the far right you can now see all the offers in the market, ranked in the order in which a borrower borrows. You can see exactly how your offer compares to everyone elses.

From this screen you can also see whether your offer is eligible for the Zopa Bonus - see this page for more information on how it works. If you are, your offer in the A 36 month market will be highlighted in green, if it’s not, and you’d be better offer with the bonus, it’s highlighted in red. Have a play, you’ll soon get the idea!

What else? Well, several behind the scenes things that will come to fruition in the near future. We’re working on making it possible for borrowers to do all sorts of interesting things with their loans - giving them total control over early repayments, changing the term and making one off payments to reduce their outstanding amount. Today we gave that functionality to our admin team - in the future it’ll be a web screen that members can access - look out for it.

Wowzers. If you’ve made it this far - you deserve a treat. Click here for a nice little game. Oh - and Happy Halloween!

Posted in Changes, New stuff, Lenders, Borrowers | 1 Comment »

Now you see us…

Posted by Dave at 3:07 pm

We’re upgrading the site this afternoon - the site is likely to be down for an hour or so from 3:30. I’ll be back with a detailed explanation of what we’ve done later, once we know it’s all worked!

Posted in Changes, Technology | No Comments »

The slightly new Zopa homepage

Posted by Dave at 3:22 pm

We’ve had a play with the Zopa homepage over the last few days - this is what we’ve been up…

The most obvious change is the rather red banner across the top! This is a space we’re going to be using to tell you about new promotions or major changes we’ve implemented. These are things that are so important, they have their own page explaining them - click on the banner to see more information.

Then, over on the left hand side, there will be a recent news quote, blog extract or some other little piece of juicy gossip we’ve heard on the grapevine - with a link through to the original article.

Finally, over on the right hand side, there is the one and only “Zopa bites ticker!” We’ll update this regularly with snippets of info that you might be interested in - click on the ticker to read more about the story that is displayed. Click ‘em quick, ‘cos they won’t be there for long.

Hope that help - we’ll be introducing lots of new stuff over the coming weeks - keep checkng back here to find out about it all!

Posted in Changes, New stuff | No Comments »

Shiny new things…

Posted by Dave at 3:30 pm

It’s a disco Friday afternoon in the Zopa office - winding up for the weekend! Have a look here to see what’s playing to get us in the mood for dancing

We had a new release yesterday - quite an unobtrusive one hopefully, and the site remained up throughout. So - what’s new? Well, the most obvious change is new markets. We’ve opened up 6, 48 and 60 month markets for lenders and borrowers. Now, there isn’t a lot of money in there right now, but over time we hope that lenders will place their offers in these markets as well as the 12, 24 and 36 month ones to give borrowers more flexibility, and lenders faster lending.

If you’re a lender, and not sure how to put your money into these markets, then here’s what you need to do: sign in to Zopa, click My Lending, and select ‘Current Lending Offer’ from the drop down menu - this will show you the money you have in the market right now. Then click ‘amend’ next to your offer, and you’ll see a screen that shows you all the available markets - simply tick the new markets, set your lending rate and click on ‘Amend’ again to place your money in the new markets.

While you’re there, you’ll also see a new option - you can now change the amount of money you lend to each borrower away from it’s default setting. This means that you can lend larger amounts to fewer borrowers (but you will be taking a slightly higher risk) and get your money lent faster. We suggest that you’re careful when using this, but we know some lenders will beneft from it.

We’ve also lowered the bad debt rates slightly in the 36 month markets - both as a result of opening the longer term markets and because we’ve now got some experience of our borrowers so we can improve our estimates.

Finally, we’ve also made some text changes through the site - we’re trying to make Zopa as simple and clear as possible, and we know we’ve got some pages with reams of text! This is an ongoing job - so over the next few months you should see lots of extraneous text vanish from the site!

Have a great weekend - and if you’ve made it this, you’re obviously dead keen on Zopa - so I’d point you to the post below, where we’re looking for guinea pigs! Please drop me a line if you’re interested.

Posted in Changes, New stuff, Lenders, Borrowers | 1 Comment »

Change is coming…change is good

Posted by Dave at 12:13 pm

A quick heads up on an important change that is happening in a couple of weeks….

We are planning on altering the way that rates are determined for borrowers within the Zopa markets. As you might know, a borrower’s interest rate is currently determined by the rate their last lender has said they are willing to lend at. (If you want to know more, have a read of our FAQ on the matching process.) This means that many lenders receive more interest than the rate they asked for, and borrowers end up paying slightly higher rates.

We’ve decided to adapt the way the matching engine calculates rates. In the future, lenders will always receive the rate they ask for, and borrowers will pay the average rate across all their lenders. So for example, if a borrower was lent £500 by one lender at a rate of 5%, and £500 by another at 10%, his overall rate would be 7.5%, and both lenders would receive the rates they offered.

We’re making this (hotly debated!) change for several reasons. Firstly, we believe that it makes the market more efficient, as borrowers will be paying a rate that more accurately reflects lender’s pricing. Secondly, we hope it will slightly reduce the rates that borrowers pay, making Zopa more attractive, to the benefit of both lenders (who will lend their money faster) and borrowers (who will pay less interest). Lastly, we simply believe this is a fairer way of matching lenders and borrowers at a rate that both agree on - and we like to be fair.

Clearly, lenders with offers in the markets may want to reprice their offers in the light of this change (Especially those who are currently offering 1% in order to lend out first in the queue!), and we’ll be contacting all our lenders over the next couple of weeks before making this live to let them know what is happening. We’d also love to hear your opinion on this change - before we do it! Let me know in the comments if you think this is a good, bad or indifferent change - we will listen to what you say!

Posted in Changes, New stuff, Lenders, Borrowers | No Comments »