In this post I wanted to give an update on my user experiences with Our Money Market from when I first started using the platform back in April 2019 (First user impressions here). During this time I’ve continued to invest and grow my portfolio of loans on the platform, but it has not been without its challenges.
I initially found the platform’s responses prompt, however since that time responses have slowed down where account inquiries and questions are taking weeks to get resolved. This is coupled with several prompts along the way to get to a satisfactory outcome. When you consider a business like this, you need both investors and borrowers alike to have seamless experiences. Unfortunately this has not been my experience to date.
While I appreciate the platform is still young, I found the user interface not as slick as other platforms out there offering the same service. On multiple occasions, the platform appears to glitch and committed funds get “stuck” in no man’s land. By this I mean funds committed to loans that do not proceed, disappear off the pending loans list (a list of the loans you have funded but not yet active), however the funds do not become available to reinvest. You can see the missing funds are still linked to your account through the summary total of committed funds but is mismatched against what loans you can see as pending. This is a problem I experienced multiple times with the latest issue taking almost four weeks and multiple follow-ups with Our Money Market to resolve.
For me, one of the drawcards of Peer to Peer lending is the ability to become a low time commitment investment. My experiences on Our Money Market have been different to this expectation. While I didn’t take stats, it felt like a large number of the loans I committed funds to, did not proceed. This occurred in two ways, majority being that funds were returned prior to the closing of funding window. I believe this is because the borrower changed their mind about taking out the loan. The second was that the loan did not get fully funded by the end of the open funding window (typically 14 days), thus funds are returned. This is a result of not enough investor activity.
Because of this I was spending a lot more time on the site to try and get funds invested than what I though was reasonable having to continually re-invest the same funds before I got a return. The platform does have an auto invest feature that I thought would help reduce this time, so I set it up (something that is not a super intuitive process). In the months auto invest was active, it did not make a single investment on my behalf. While I continued to adjust setting, I still could not get it to work. Feedback from Our Money Market was there was nothing wrong with the Auto Invest.
While I understand Our Money Market is still a young business, I feel I’ve been very persistent and patient working through the challenges with the platform expecting them to be resolved. However based on the culmination of these experiences to date, I’ve decided to no long actively use this platform at this stage. I recognise this is only my experience using Our Money Market, thus I am interested to here from other people who has invested on the platform and the experiences they’ve had.
No comments:
Post a Comment