Funding Circle slow selling

kcrane

Yes'ish.

I think there was a time, a few years, at the beginning of P2P, where the financial environment suited them. They were lending relatively low volumes, could afford to be choosy and the banks were not competing. I had money in Ratesetter, Zopa and FC. They all did OK for a couple of years, then went soft, then went bad.

Ratesetter then screwed up and recovered, whilst FC and Zopa went for growth and stock exchange listings. I should have exited earlier. But you live and learn.

jp181

I have had a similar experience. I put my loan parts up from my classic account (non-ISA) for sale 6 weeks ago, but they have still not sold.

I did pay in more money to my ISA account since they were put on sale, but only a small fraction of that went to buying up loan parts, the majority went to new loans. I see similar behaviour for how money from repayments is allocated.

So it is entirely down to Funding Circle - their system decides how much money goes to the primary and secondary markets. They could adjust it if they wanted, but they are obviously more interested in handing out more money in loans than allowing investors to access their funds.

kcrane

Exactly, it isn't in FCs interest to help lenders to exit.

paulsaves

I put up £2.5k loan parts for sale on 31st March 2019. The sale completed today (20th May). Only £1.6k of loan parts actually completed for sale.
Since I would like to have some understanding of when my investment can be withdrawn if I need it, and the amount that I can withdraw, Funding Circle no longer suits me and I'll be (very slowly) withdrawing my funds.

With the benefit of hindsight, the time to get out was when they stopped investors being able to have some control over which borrowers or sectors to lend to.

kcrane

Yep, a lot of us think the same.

criston

Make a note of your selling instruction dates.
Keep your eye on p2pindependentforum.com, funding circle, selling-loans-time-frame.
Register there & provide me with your dates & I will enter you in the list.
You will then know within a few days how long you will have to wait.
Funding Circle say they cannot provide you with length of time for the future (which is true), but they will know what the current selling time is, but choose to avoid providing the information unless pushed. So I am doing it for them.

inatrance

Put £10k up for sale on 9th April, took 55 days to sell and only £6k sold.

Now having to start from scratch for the remaining balance. It's allowed all but £25 to be listed for sale again, so not sure why it didn't sell first time round. At this rate it will be the best part of a year before I can access all my funds.

One of the main reasons that I chose Funding Circle was zero selling fees and their flexible ISA, but this is about as far from flexible as I can imagine. It is very frustrating that there's no indication of how much you'll receive from the sale until it actually goes through.

itwasntme001

Tarambor wrote: »

Comes as no surprise. Borrowers don't use FC because they're good credit worthy individuals who can get decent rates at mainstream banks, borrowers use FC because none of the main financial institutions will touch them with a bargepole which should be all the warnings you need. Those institutions have server farms full of historical financial data and decades if not centuries of experience of lending to people and employ teams of highly qualified and experienced risk assessors and if they come to the conclusion it is a bad risk and they won't lend then usually it means it it.

Completely agree. P2P is a scam - i was one of those mugs who "invested" across many platforms but i have been force selling out of it since a year ago. Still have few hundred quid left due to bad debt in many of the P2P. I cant imagine what it would be like if i started selling now.


Best to completely avoid all P2P and stick to traditional forms of investing.

criston

inatrance: Look at the link I mentioned just above your post & you will find the answers to your questions.

The first post shows ongoing selling times.

Page 7 of the thread tells you how to know approximately how much you will end up with, by keeping an eye on how many loan parts are for sale & how they gradually reduce while you are waiting.

Click on 'My Portfolio', click on 'Loan Parts', click on 'Status Box', Choose 'For Sale', scroll down to where it says 'Displaying Loan Parts 1 - 10 of XXX in total ' The XXX is your total being sold.

Make a note today of your loan parts for sale, they would have reduced by about 1% per day since your instructed your sale. From now on you can assess the reduction yourself.

hahnchen

I have a standard Funding Circle account, and an ISA with them. Their rates are poor. I've opened both about 18 months ago, with thousands in both.

My annualised return is 2.7% and 3.3%. If we look at a chart of annualised returns over time, I understand that I am in the trough of lowest returns - (google funding circle investor returns change over time)

However, at my current rates, if I follow that trend, I am unlikely to even hit the lowest bound of their current projected 4.5% return. When I opened my accounts, the project return was 7.5%

We can also see that the riskiest loans in years 1-2. I would like my returns invested in safer older debt (which is taking months to sell according to this thread), yet every day Funding Circle keeps adding the risky new stuff to my portfolio. Funding Circle are clearly prioritising onboarding more borrowers over servicing existing investors.

That would be fine if the new borrowers had a consistent quality. But looking at Funding Circle's default rate by year, it is quite obvious that as volumes have increased, standards have slipped. (google - funding circle statistics)