Zopa API v0.5, A new techie toy to play with Options

[elljay]

the site doesn't show the "maximum individual offering".

There's some more data on the MI page - it gives max loan; total on offer and number of offers in each market. Also the rate last offered at various levels in the 36 month markets.

As it happens I started graphing the MI page data a few days ago... At the risk of using up all my bandwidth the page is here. The breaks in the graphs are due to my dodgy router!

Didn't realise the xml pages were available - I'll add some more graphs for the data on the overview.xml page. Not majorly excited by the data on the other pages...

[asking]

Nice! What did you create that with? Perl?

I made something very similar for my shares in PHP which just harvests the latest bid prices from Yahoo Finance and tallys up my portfolio. Does the same with the FTSE All-share to compare performances.

Unfortunately, while the rates, loan amounts etc are interesting, harvesting the real-time offers on the market would be the real gem. i.e. the same data as the excel file, but real time and in XML/CSV.

Come on Zopa... it's easy to do... and would gain good publicity from bloggers. : )

[elljay]

Nice! What did you create that with? Perl?

Thanks, yup, it's a bit of home grown Perl feeding everyone's favourite rrdtool, with the front end driven by a modified version of Haroon Rafique's rrd.cgi.

Unfortunately, while the rates, loan amounts etc are interesting, harvesting the real-time offers on the market would be the real gem. i.e. the same data as the excel file, but real time and in XML/CSV.

Yup, or the last matched lender rates and loan size in each market.

[glyn]

You can import xml data into Excel very easily.

Go to Data/XML/Import then paste the xml URL from your browser into the filename box (try http://www.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/Reports/Marketplace/zopas.xml) then click the import button.

Excel will format the data for you and will set up drop menus so that you can filter the data.

[tft10]

Seems like the computer experts are going to have a huge advantage in interpreting the data and automatically optimising their rates.

To be useful in this way ISTM the API should allow programmed setting of offers, and a complete, real-time dump of all data on
current offers and borrowing requests. I assume this would have to be in some very low-level format, or as an online query of
Zopa's database in whatever form that takes, which is fine by me. It should allow the automatic construction of the weekly
spreadsheet, but at any point in time.

That said, I don't see under the current circumstances that there would be any "huge advantage" at all.

I read the current situation as one where it is difficult for the lender to obtain a return as high as a good
deposit account (>6%) + bad-debt risk + zopa fee. In this case, the only useful strategy seems to be completely
non-adaptive: set rates to 6 + bad-debt + fee + margin (maybe 0.5-1%) and sit around for ever waiting for the
occasional fluctuations when the market comes to you, not the other way round.

Tim.

[cornetto]

As it happens I started graphing the MI page data a few days ago... At the risk of using up all my bandwidth the page is here. The breaks in the graphs are due to my dodgy router

Elljay - These are great - Only looking from time to time, I hadn't realised the variability in some of the numbers including the ZOPA min/max - I've already added your graphs to my favourites!

[elljay]

I've already added your graphs to my favourites!

Graphs are gooood...

[Stobby]

Wondering how many borrowers there have ever been?

Well you can find the answer by using this: http://www.zopa.com/WebApi/flashapi.ashx

Its a queryable ashx file, so you provide it with some pre-approved parameters and it sends you an xml formatted response. I've no idea if i'm gonna get a smacked hand for this cos its not public and i went digging to find it, but here is how to use it:

First you decide what type of members you are looking for, either borrowers, everyone, people who've lent or people who've borrowed. You can then narrow the search for members even further.

CODE

type=borrowers        grade    - A*, A, B, C
            ratefrom    - 0.0 to 20.0 in .1 increments
            rateto    - 0.0 to 20.0 in .1 increments
            loc    - first two letters of postcode
            agefrom    - integer values
            ageto    - integer values
            termfrom    - 12, 24, 36, 48, 60
            termto    - 12, 24, 36, 48, 60

type=all            loc
            joindate    - not too sure about this one, it seems to be the date specified as the number of seconds since 1st jan 1970.
            agefrom
            ageto

type=lent            grade
            ratefrom
            rateto
            loc
            agefrom
            ageto
            termfrom
            termto

type=offering        grade
            ratefrom
            rateto
            loc
            agefrom
            ageto
            termfrom
            termto

Example 1: I would like to see members who have borrowed between 5.0% and 5.1% and have an age of between 18 and 27. The address i would enter into my browser would be:

http://www.zopa.com/WebApi/flashapi.ashx?t...18&ageto=27

I would find out that there are 6 such borrowers, and have an average rate of 5.2%.

Example 2: I want to see lenders from guilford (GU postcode) offering in the A* market. The address i would enter into my browser would be:

http://www.zopa.com/WebApi/flashapi.ashx?t...GU&grade=A*

I would find that there are 21 lenders who fit the criteria, although only 20 are shown, and some are shown twice as they offer in 2 different terms, 12 and 24 month.

Hope you enjoy this,

Stobby

ps. at the time of writing it was 2712 borrowers since the start of zopa!

[chancer]

ps. at the time of writing it was 2712 borrowers since the start of zopa!

average loan £4k. total lending £10.8m. zopa gross income £100k, of which some is future income from lenders.

[Ledney]

Stobby this must be the code that drives the 'game' on the front page of Zopa. You can use all of those filters and just checking I get the same number of borrowers.

[Justin]

Yeah, that's the feed for the Flash movie on the front page.

We're looking into piggy-backing some more useful data into this mechanism as a way of getting more data out there.

And no Stobby, you're not going to get your hand slapped for decompiling our Flash...

J

[elljay]

Note the xml pages Dave talks about in the first post have moved to http://www.zopa.com/Marketplace/ in the latest site update.

[bigfoot12]

We're cooking up a Zopa API, but we thought we'd release an alpha version to see what you can do with it.

We've taken the XML data we use for the online marketplace screens and made it accessible directly via a URL.

borrowers.xml (Details of Zopa borrowers)
demand.xml (Total amount requested by market in the last 7 days from our loan calculator)
lenders.xml (Details of Zopa lenders)
money.xml (Total amount offered in each market)
newmembers.xml (Details of the most recent Zopa members)
overview.xml (6 key stats from Zopa today)
rates.xml (Average rates for last 5 loans applied for by market)
zopas.xml (The high / low rates offered by lenders in a market, and the high / low of the Zopa in each market)

Any questions - just shout!

What else would you like to see included here?

I cannot get money.xml to work. The others seem fine. Has it been turned off?

Also am I right in thinking this is only summary information? It would be great to get the lists of offers in each market.

[Tristan]

I cannot get money.xml to work. The others seem fine. Has it been turned off?

The money feed is new-money.xml

Also am I right in thinking this is only summary information? It would be great to get the lists of offers in each market.

We don't have this available in an API at present, you can find this information after signing in though:
Sign in > My Zopa Today > The Markets > Market ZOPAs > *click* the blue (i) at the end of the market row for a list of money lent on that market.

Tristan

[bigfoot12]

Thank you for that. Are there any other xml's not in the original list.

I was hoping to get the Lenders in the market in an xml form (no need to log in) rather than the link you just pointed out to me.

[elljay]

The money feed is new-money.xml

Hi Tristan, please could you advise what the s, a, b and c represent?

<item term="12" s="267480" a="276360" b="280340" c="272600" />

Thanks

[elljay]

Ah, my brain is in gear now - "s" is A*.

[richardm]

The money feed is new-money.xml

The feed http://uk.zopa.com/Marketplace/new-money.xml does not seem to include the data for the Y markets. E.g. (note: s = A*)

CODE

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<money Range="827450">
        <item term="36" s="812800" a="827450" b="810970" c="737810" />
        <item term="60" s="485720" a="475570" b="460820" c="411630" />
</money>

but Elljay's graphs seem to include the data for Y. Is this raw data available?

[gaz1977]

Hi,

I've been playing about with Zopa as a lender for a few weeks now.
My day job though is a Flash Developer, and I'm tempted to build a Flash application that consumes your xml api. If it's good enough, I'd release it to the zopa community.

Flash has an inbuilt security system though, which means it can only access xml that it has been granted permission to use. To do this, Zopa would need to put a cross-domain policy file on their website. The file must be called crossdomain.xml, placed in the web root and have the following content:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Full details of this can be found in the adobe documentation:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ActionScript/3...90204-7e08.html

Thanks

P.S the Market Information link mentioned in this thread doesn't seem to work:
http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/MI/

[dhjgodin]

Hi

Could I get up to date urls for all of the xml files available in the API. I might have a go at knocking something together too.

Thanks in advance