Jon at Zopa

figures18, on Sep 1 2010, 06:13 PM, said:

Hi,

Sorry it's taken a while to get back to you... essentially we are relying on our partners to keep track of people they request quotes on behalf of. They send us through an identifier that we can use to track whether the person has requested a quote through their site during the same session.

It sounds like this mechanism isn't working as intended. I've spent some time looking at it but can't see anything obviously wrong so I'll need to do some further investigation this week and I'll report back when I know more.

Jon

Hi,

The expected behaviour with the new unwinding process looks like this:

- Borrower requests a quote, resulting in lender money being tied up in the offer.
- Borrower requests a second quote. Their first quote is scheduled for unwinding, the second quote is built.
- Borrower requests further quotes. In each case, any previous quotes are scheduled for unwinding.
- Borrower either cancels the quote, in which case it is scheduled for unwinding, accepts it or leaves the site, in which case it will be scheduled for unwinding after 30 minutes.

The unwinding process currently runs every 5 minutes. It used to be the case that previous borrowings were unwound at the point a new one was created but this was both putting unnecessary strain on the system and causing the process of applying to take an excessively long time - unwinding a match isn't quite as complicated as building it in the first place, but it's still a lot of work.

Obviously I appreciate this might mean one user can tie up a chunk of your available funds for a short period of time, but in our view this is the best compromise. The problem we have is that when we are listed on external sites, we are shown alongside other companies that can quote a rate based on credit score and loan amount. The calls our partners make to these companies to get their rates are therefore very fast, and as a result there is pressure on us to return our rate as quickly as possible. The rate we quote has to be the rate we will give the user, so we do need to do a full match rather than just showing our "headline" rate. Adding an unwind process at the beginning pushes us over the acceptable length of time to return our rate - hence our decision to do it separately.

The benefit this has to you as a lender is that we are seeing a definite upturn in traffic through our partners - so you do have more chance of getting your money lent out. We're keeping an eye on the process and with the recent improvements we've made to our infrastructure it's possible we may be able to up the frequency of the unwind process which should improve things for you.

I hope this matches up with what you're observing in your lending account - please let me know if there's anything that's not explained by the above.

Thanks
Jon

Thanks!

As a certified hater of marmite, I'm more than happy to get the cakes in if it means I can stay away from the chocolate :-)

easteregg, on Jun 28 2010, 12:54 PM, said:

Hi,

The listing has not finished yet - so people can still bid on it for another 45 minutes or so. Funds won't be released unless the borrower, MBrockway, decided not to take the offer after listing has finished.

Regards
Jon

sl75, on Jun 28 2010, 12:10 PM, said:

Hello,

We put in a fix for that particular issue a few weeks ago - although this case is slightly different. However, from a look at the listing and associated data, there's no technical reason why this shouldn't work.

Regards
Jon