Chewing the fat, shooting the breeze, having a natter - call it what you like, talking to people is darn important and everyone should do it as often as they can (except in libraries). We talk to our members as much as possible, through our blog and discussion board and by getting people to email contactus@zopa.com if anything's on their mind.
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.
I was fortunate to be able to join Tim Parlett last night to collect another award for Zopa’s you-beaut, patent-pending, multiple-Consumer-Credit-Act-document-electronic-signing-widget.
This time it was Financial Services Technology Project of the Year at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards 2007. And it was interesting to note that we were the only retail application nominated amidst various financial markets projects. In fact, Credit Suisse were nominated twice in the same category. Clearly the UK consumer is in dire need of a little more financial services innovation!
Congratulations to all the other winners, including Balderton stable-mate Betfair (Retail & Leisure Technology Project of the Year) and the nice folks from Bebo, with whom it was a nice surprise to be seated. Not content with taking our UK Internet Innovation of the Year award from last year, they then beat us to the comfy seats in the bar at the top of the hotel. Talk about world domination. Not sure where they rushed off to next, but their seats were ominously empty by the time we left…
Zopa has been working with Microsoft for a few months now - looking at ways in which we can use some of their new Windows Live services to provide useful tools for our members. As a result of this, they were kind enough to invite me over to Las Vegas the other week to take part in the Mix 07 conference they were hosting.
They describe Mix as being “A 72 hour conversation” - and with a great mix of developers, designers and the odd business person (like me) it was a great few days - with some very interesting Keynote speakers and content.
Zopa’s little moment of fame came when I talked about Zopa and demoed a new service we’re hoping to roll out very shortly (We’ve done our bit - Microsoft need to finish theirs!) - you can see the video below.
The idea is to use your Windows Live contact list (or your Hotmail, or MSN Messenger contacts - they’re all the same thing) in the Zopa ‘Tell a friend’ scheme - so you don’t have to type in everyones email addresses again and again. To do this, we’re using a new service from Microsoft that allows third parties like Zopa to access and amend users contacts (With their permission of course) - and we’re one of the first companies in the world to be doing this.
I also talk a little in the video about future plans for creating ‘friends and family’ networks within Zopa - using additional Microsoft services that they’re planning on releasing over the next 12 months - but the ‘Tell a friend’ piece should be live very soon.
I’d be interested to hear what you think about the new tool - and also what else you think we could be doing with Microsoft.
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!
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.
A little while ago I wrote a post that talked about what the blog and discussion board were for. In the comments to that post, we got talking about a Zopa wiki. (Wikipedia link on wiki’s)
I thought it might be a good (and at the very least, interesting) idea to create a Zopa wiki that was a space for us and our members to help answer questions that other members have about Zopa.
Of course, we already have a Zopa help section but in my opinion, it’s not that great! After all, it’s just our opinion about what questions our members might have, and it’s our attempt at answering our questions.
As I mention on the discussion board thread it does look a bit dodgy at the moment, but if it takes off, then we’ll upgrade to make it look like the rest of Zopa, get rid of the ads etc etc.
Please go and have a play - you’ll need the wiki password (zopawiki) to edit pages, but that’s all.
We had a web site release yesterday - which I’ve said I won’t write about here any more (and talk about them on the discussion boards instead), but this was an important one.
For the first time at Zopa, it is possible to lend more than £25,000 to Zopa borrowers. This is a great thing - it means we can have larger lenders lending through Zopa, which means that more borrowers will get the loans they want - which has to be a good thing for all concerned.
It’s been a big job to get this live, and the reason why is principally to do with a piece of legislation known as the Consumer Credit Act (CCA).
Because people who lend more than £25,000 could be considered to be lending in the course of a business by the Office of Fair Trading (who are responsible for regulating unsecured lending in the UK), they need two things - 1) a consumer credit licence, and 2) to be lending in a way that is in line with the CCA.
The CCA sets out, in painful detail, exactly how a loan contract should be presented to borrowers, how both parties should sign it, and what document has to be available. It’s been designed with big banks in mind - where there is one lender and one borrower.
Zopa is of course slightly different. Lenders lend to at least 50 borrowers, in £10 contracts (£500 for CCA lenders, unless they ask us to change it). So a CCA lender (who are the only lenders who need to worry about this) can have hundreds of contracts to sign. Each one has be individually signed with a distinct action on the behalf of the lender (So a tick box that say’s “Sign all” won’t cut it), with it’s own time stamp. In additin, each contact has to be made available as a downloadable (and signable!) PDF document - all filled out with the amount of the contact, the lenders contact details (Their username, and Zopa’s Tipton address) and the time and date. Quite a task….
Anyway - after much work and input from just about everyone in the office (We’re an opinionated lot around here) we finally came up with a solution. It’s so clever, it’s patent pending, and because only CCA lenders will get to see it ‘in the wild’ I thought I’d show you a video of it here. (Can you tell we’ve got a YouTube account recently?)
(You can also download it here (Quicktime file) - slightly better quality than the YouTube version - and a snip at 9MB)
Besides this new signing screen, there has been a huge amount of work on the entire site to get this implemented, and I think it’s worth taking some time to thanks people individually - so here goes:
Tim - for managing the whole process and getting it delivered on time
Simon DJ - for legal input and creative thinking about how you sign contracts online
Ian @ BJSS - for leading the team there who have created a technical wonder - we really have no idea how it actually works
Sarah and Justin - for managing the design and usability work involved….with him being an Apple user is it any wonder we settled on 1 button?
Damon and Dan @ Pynk & Fluffy - for the early Flash mock ups and working up endless prototypes
Giles - for getting lenders to sign up to lend under the Zopa Powerlender scheme
Thomas B and Tom E - for HTML, deployment skills under pressure and lots of copy
Hilary, Ian and everyone else in Tipton - for testing the release over a hot and sweaty weekend, and making sure everything (pretty much) worked as it was supposed to
James - for pushing the whole damn thing into motion in the first place
You might not have noticed, but over on the discussion board we’ve been talking about the new Zopa API (v0.5!). An API is a a way that third parties (members, other organisations etc) can access Zopa data without coming to the Zopa web site and signing in.
The first baby steps on this path have been taken - we’ve taken the data from the marketplace screens and made it available via a URL as XML data. In future we want to allow members to access their own data this way (with security in place) and eventually, to allow people to transact at Zopa, from outside the website.
We’ll be extending the range of data available over this path in the coming months - but in the mean time, go have a look, and see what you can do with this new tool.
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.
Nothing too exciting about todays release I’m afraid, but for the sake of completeness I feel I should write something!
The major improvement is for new members - we’ve changed the identification rules that we use when you join Zopa so that if you say you want to be a lender, you are far more likely to be able to complete your identification online. This is because Zopa lenders only need to pass money laundering regulations - which are far less strict than the id checks we need to complete for borrowers.
Up until now we did this offline the following day - now lenders can join Zopa in one seamless journey - and using the new functionality from a couple of weeks ago, they can lend the same day! (As long as they remember to transfer funds in afterwards from their bank of course.)
The other changes are behind the scenes stuff to make it easier for us to give you a better service.
Well, we’ve plugged everything back in again, turned it all on, and thankfully, it seems to be working! The site is back up and healthy - so what’s changed?
There are two major functionality improvements that will be most noticeable to members.
Firstly, you can now lend any amount you want to - from £10 to £25,000 - there’s no more £500 minimum! This means that if you want to try out Zopa with as little as £10 you can - although you’ll only be lending that £10 to one borrower - not 50. In fact, if you lend less than £500, you’ll be lending to less than 50 people, which slightly increases the risk that you won’t get your expected return (because you’re less diversified). On the other hand, it’s less money that you’re lending out. If you lend more than £500, your money will be diversified in the same way as before - over at least 50 borrowers.
Secondly, and more radically - you can now lend money that you don’t have at Zopa! Well, almost.
We’ve changed the system to allow lenders to make a lending offer of up to £25,000 before you transfer funds to Zopa - the offer will appear in your screens and you can amend the rates or withdraw - but it won’t be available to borrowers until you send in enough money to fully fund it. As soon as that happens, it will be placed in the market automatically, without you having to do a thing.
We’ve done this to make it easier to lend money at Zopa - you don’t have to wait for creaky old BACS to take 3 days to send your money and then come back to Zopa - you can do everything you need to do in one go. Also, it means that new lenders can really understand how Zopa works before sending in money, which hopefully will mean more of them do so!
Another thing we’ve enabled is that borrowers can now change their bank account details after they’ve set them up - we’ve a few borrowers for whom this has been an issue, and it’s going to make their (and our) lives a lot easier.
Finally, we’ve cleaned up the screen that shows your current lending offers - and replaced lots of links (withdraw, amend and lend more) with a little drop down menu to allow you to manage your offer much more simply.
Hope that is all useful - let us know in the comments what you think once you’ve had a play.
We’ll be taking the site down this afternoon at around 2:30 to upgrade the systems and add in some fun new functionality….check back later for more details on what we’ve done (Once we’re confident it’s all gone smoothly)
You can find this treasure trove of shining wit, sparkling conversation and informed debate by clicking here, which will be a relief to everyone who’s put up with my wittering here for the last few months!
I’ve been thinking about how to get Zopa members more involved with Zopa, and how we can make it easier to hear you. I thought about allowing some members to post on the blog, but I’ve been watching the Prosper discussion site since it launched, and decided that it was a better way.
Go have look and let me know what you think - either here, or on the discussion board! Suggestions for extra topics of discussion or anything else that doesn’t seem to work properly appreciated.
You’ll need to register on the board to start a new topic, but anyone can reply to existing topics. I’ll keep an eye on how this works and might change it later depending on how it goes.
For now, there is a permanent link over there on the right, under Zopa Chat, but hopefully if this works, we’ll add more links from around the site.
More good stuff is on it’s way right now as we upgrade the site.
For lenders - you can look forward to being able to lend the money in your holding account, even if it’s less than £500, by adding it to your most recent offer - this means that you can start earning a higher return on it by lending it to borrowers without having to wait for more repayments to come back in.
This is a start - over the coming weeks we’re going to be adding the ability to lend less than £500 from the very first time you join Zopa, and also to automatically relend the repayments you receive from borrowers - 2 much requested features.
Also released today is an improved member get member scheme - now it’s behind the sign in security, so we can pre-populate the email we send out to your friends and help you to spread the word about Zopa. This fits in really well with my previous post on ‘flipping the funnel’ - now go and use it! (And get paid for the privilege)
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