‘New stuff’ category

Simple is as simple does

Posted by Dave at 1:50 pm

We're spending a lot of time at the moment thinking about the next generation of Zopa - and as you might imagine, we have lots (and lots) of ideas about what we'd like 'Zopa 2.0' to be, what we'd like it to be able to offer members, and how it all might work. But actually thinking up all this stuff is the easy bit. It turns out the hard(est) bit is to make it all usable for our members - simple but powerful is a terribly difficult combination of things to achieve. To be honest, I think we started out well - with the help of our friends at Pynk and Fluffy - but we've gone down hill over the last 6 months as we've been frantically adding in all the things we wanted to build for launch and never had the time or money to do so. Anyway - this post was inspired by a great Fast Company article about the beauty of simplicity. When we pause, take a deep breath, and start to design Zopa 2.0 (and we've asked P&F to help us again so Tim and I don't make it look like, er... this) we're going to be working really hard on the simplicity angle. My personal belief is that Zopa is still at the 'pre iPod MP3 player' stage - lots of people thought that the concept of having all your music in your pocket was a great idea....but it took Apple to take that idea and make it truely usable. Today, Zopa is a bit like the Rio Diamond (but with nicer colours), tomorrow, we want to be the iPod. (Does that make any sense?) What would you like to see Zopa make simpler? Are there things about the site today that just confuse the heck out of you? Let us know, and we'll see what we can.

Posted in Design, New stuff, Technology | 17 Comments »

Fantastic members!

Posted by Dave at 1:01 pm

If you're not a borrower at Zopa, there is a little feature that may have escaped your notice. We think it's great, and what some of our members do with it is even better. We let our borrowers leave a message for their lenders as part of their borrowing application. We thought people might like to say a little bit about what they were going to use the loan for, say 'hello' or just - 'thanks.' It turns out that a really surprising number of borrowers have used it, to leave all sorts of messages. I thought I'd share a few of the most inspiring, touching and just downright lovely ones with a wider audience - thank you to these members for letting me do this. No need for more from me, I'll let them speak for themselves: matchsticks

"Hello. I am really looking forward to using the money to help others. I am expanding my business to include career services and coaching so that I can guide people more effectively through their chosen field of work. Can't wait !!"

artylawyer

"I need the loan to consolidate debts. I bought a former home with a partner, who moved out. I took over the whole of the mortgage until the place could be sold and this (because it was a mortgage designed for two but paid for by one!) led to some debt (all of which will be covered by the loan). My ex partner has no claims on me now, of course - and my mortgage on my new flat is entirely manageable (as would be the repayments on the loan). I'm far from extravagent - I just picked the wrong person to buy a first home with!"

mrevell

"I plan to consolidate existing debt so that I'm in a better position to start a business with my wife, so we can have more time together and build a better life."

jscales1

"I have 2 personal loans at present, one with a balance of about £15k that was taken out for my car - that will remain in place. The second is for £4k which was for a new kitchen - I had no plans to change this as it was at a very good rate. However, it is with Cahoot and the rate is going to jump from 5.8 to 8.5 as it apparently was a "promotional rate" - an outrageous leap which I find offensive. The second element for the loan is to repay my overdraft - this has risen to £2k as I bought my brother a holiday that he desperately needed after a hideous break -up from his wife - he went to visit my other brother in Singapore with his kids. He is a farmer, with little money and I think he needed the break.I have been fully employed for over 20 years, have never defaulted on a payment although I may have been late in sending the odd credit card payment.If you decide to lend me the money, you will be doing me a favour and giving a poke in the eye to Cahoot."

And a final word from berlioz....

"Thanks for supporting the other side of a cool system."

We're going to develop this feature over the coming weeks to see what our members use it for - and hence this is also a request for some impromptu market research. Would you be interested in talking to other Zopa members? Would you like to talk to anyone, or just people that you've transacted with? How much privacy / anonymity would you need? Is the whole thing a waste of time, effort and caffeine? Please give us your opinions (as provocative as you like) in the comments, or you can always mail me directly if you'd rather do that. Ta.

Posted in Borrowers, Hints, Lenders, Members, New stuff | 7 Comments »

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

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