‘Technology’ category

How low can you go?

Posted by Luke at 8:18 am

Hi everyone, just thought I’d post a quick note about some recent changes to our site.

As you can probably tell, we’ve gussied up our homepage a bit. Now you can keep up on what your Zopa friends are doing with the new “On Zopa Now” ticker, or search for them directly using the Borrower Search tool. Right now it searches for borrowers only, but soon you’ll be able to search for your other Zopa pals too.

The coolest change to the homepage (imho) is the “New Zopa Rate.” You can hold your mouse over one of those orange “New Zopa Rates” on the homepage to see what it’s all about, but here’s a summary: because Zopa borrowers often receive Help with their monthly loan payments, their effective interest rate is sometimes lower than the one they originally signed up for. For example, wlaffin may have borrowed at 12.99%, but because he’s receiving so much Help right now, his effective interest rate is actually below 0%. Not only does that mean he’s paying no interest on his loan, he’s actually paying back less money than he borrowed in the first place! How about that!

(Not to brag or anything, but this is what really sets Zopa apart: only at Zopa can you take control of your interest rate and wrestle it to the ground. Pretty sweet deal, right? Ok, that was bragging.)

We’ve also made several changes to your profile pages (here’s a rundown on those), and added a new “Summary” feature that tells investors why you’re on Zopa. To edit your Summary, sign in to Zopa and click on the “Edit Profile” link. Whatever you enter in the “Summary” field will be displayed to Zopa CD buyers, so don’t be shy — tell your story and drive that interest rate down!

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A Note on Zopa Technology

Posted by Rajesh at 11:01 am

I thought we’d give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of the technical issues we’ve solved in order to bring you Zopa (seeing as how I’m the CTO and all).

When we set out to build the partnerships with credit unions, one big technical question we had to answer was, how do we integrate all our partners?

We looked at existing loan origination and servicing systems and their interfaces with core banking systems. None of them fit the bill for what we were trying to achieve – they required too much up-front investment and integration work both on our part and on the part of our partners. We wanted to make the process of getting partners on board as simple as possible.

So, we built our own web-based workflow tool in-house. Every Zopa Loan application goes into a real-time work queue and along the way gets underwritten, decisioned, and disbursed. The tool is an ASP.NET web application communicating with the business logic layer via WCF. What makes the system unique and different from traditional loan origination & servicing systems is that the underlying business objects are shared across the end user web application and the dashboard. In traditional systems, a loan application or lead gets decisioned in the origination system and then it is moved into a separate servicing system that manages the lifecycle of the loan. At Zopa, we provide a single integrated view of origination and servicing using shared business objects. This might not sound all that fancy if you don’t follow technology but trust me it’s a pretty big deal!

But the best part is, that our partners do not need to go through a long process of systems integration – just a web browser and Internet connection from their workplace will do.

BTW, we can always use a few more good ASP.NET and C# people, as we have many more technical challenges to solve. If that sounds interesting, drop us a note.

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