Assetz Capital and FOS

Poorly informed shareholder ...

From widespread & in depth experience of P2P admin, administration will be more expensive, protracted & even more clueless. While AC have demonstrated regular incompetence & errors, they are at least things lenders have been generally able to get sorted & at least have recourse to a statutory complaint procedure. That all goes with admin leaving only expensive legal action.

Therefore I agree with the poster that admin is the last resort ... but disagree that what AC are presenting now is in anyway what lenders signed up to.

I asked them about it last month and it's been forwarded to senior management but I've yet to receive a response. It makes no sense, expecially as they have confirmed to us that there are no future commitments.

Timescale is entirely dependent on loan redemptions ... there have been a lot of extensions & delayed redemptions in the last few months. You can't extrapolate from the last 2 months because redemptions are inevitably lumpy. The value of loans that should have repaid (ie hit term) each of the last two months was in double digits, the actual redemptions were low single digits (will publish latest numbers later) which inevitably reduces funds distributed to lenders. Similarly drawdowns have slower than timetabled so funds to meet those commitments are being retained over a longer period than originally projected.

But I don't understand (seriously I do not) how being required to handle a FEW complaints (presumably assuming they can't win against those) by a mere handful of customers against the thousands of unhappy (but effectively 'queued') customers could threaten the viability of the operation?

So come on you expert, tell me how it's done that complaints cause the wheels to fall off this well-oiled money chiseling whereby we now pay them to do what the borrowers have already paid them for? What is the synopsis of 'The Road to Aministartion' movie (with Hope and Crosby)?

AC has acknowledged the practice of front-loading fees, prioritising rapid profit maximisation, all while committing to a prolonged 4/5 year run-off strategy.

These actions send conflicting message and signals. AC has a history of incompetence and a pattern of manipulation. It would be naïve to not consider a greater scheme at play here.

For those who prefer a cautious approach, waiting to see how things unfold may be a suitable option. Personally, I've seen enough to sit idly by.

Stuart Law and his team should be held responsible and restricted from participating in the financial industry to protect others from potential harm.

I am only guessing in what I say, albeit having chatted to a couple of others who have more recently left, but I think AC had "no choice" but to front load the fees.  Take this with a pinch of salt as it's just a guess but what I think happened is that they ran out of cash / were going to fall below regulatory minimum reserves back when they shuttered retail lending which is what forced their hand.

Allegedly they haven't been lending very much via the institutions, so are more or less funded via the income and fee from the retail book and the historic institutional loans, which would make them dependent on this fee to keep the lights on.  I suspect that when they originally set out the tapering of the fee that they expected lending volumes to have increased by now but that this hasn't happened.

My fear for lenders would be if the fee has been used to fund a pivot of the business that hasn't worked out, leaving the loan book with the same future recovery costs but with that much less to pay for it, and a business that ends up either limping on or in administration anyway.  It will be interesting to see if they extend the fee again.