Harmoney

[mccollr]

The Commerce Commission is gearing up to launch civil proceedings related to
the fees peer-to-peer lender Harmoney charges borrowers.

Harmoney said the High Court action - on a "case stated" basis -
would clarify whether Harmoney's platform fee was subject to the Credit
Contracts and Consumer Finance Act.

"The case stated procedure is rarely used and enables the courts to
provide a ruling on the interpretation of a particular law," the company
said.
Harmoney's joint chief executive, Neil Roberts, said that during the
platform's Financial Markets Authority licensing process the company worked
with "all stakeholders" and documented its business model in detail
following "extensive legal advice".

"As the first peer-to-peer provider to seek and obtain a license, we
consulted with the Commerce Commission and MBIE [the Ministry of Business,
Innovation and Employment] providing them with full details of our business
model including detailed information about fees," Roberts said.

The Commerce Commission questions that claim, however.

"It's not true that they gave us all their company information
including fees modelling before their launch," a Commerce Commission
spokesman told the Herald.

"They have also never produced their legal advice despite our requests
for it."

Harmoney hit back, saying MBIE corrospondence released under the Official
Information Act and emails proved the commission was consulted on fees and
other aspects of its business prior to the launch.

Harmoney charges a platform fee of $375 to borrowers of all
risk grades and loan amounts.

Harmoney chairman David Flack said he was committed to ensuring Harmoney,
New Zealand's first licensed peer-to-peer platform, complied with all laws and
regulations.
"It is disappointing that the Commerce Commission is seeking to clarify
the legal position - as it affects the entire peer-to-peer industry - by
bringing this case stated action by using Harmoney's operating model as the
basis for the judicial review," Flack said.

He said it was "highly problematic" when interpretation of each
law by government departments resulted in a lack of clarity around how
regulations applied to peer-to-peer platforms.

"For this reason we have also met with the Commerce and Consumer
Affairs Minister Paul Goldsmith to request that is issue be clarified by an
appropriate legislative change."

In a separate action, the Commerce Commission has filed Fair Trading Act
charges in the Auckland District Court alleging Harmoney misled users into
believing they had been approved for personal loans.

Harmoney reported a loss of $14.2 million from revenue of $8.6 million in
the year to March 31, 2016.

"Thousands of New Zealanders borrow and lend every day on the Harmoney
platform and we have gone about building, launching and operating the platform
in exactly the manner anticipated by the new legislation that made p2p
platforms possible in New Zealand," Roberts said.
"Harmoney has built a highly transparent and interactive marketplace
since it became the first operator in this new area of financial services in
New Zealand."

[DrewBroadley]

I'd love to be able to have the ability to export to xcel, every field/column that you can see in the "Loan details" and "Borrower details".
If you go to Reports>Loans and click on any LAI you have invested in - there are 2 tabs with 30 odd fields - after lots of sorting in xcel you would have some very valuable insights when compared to loan real loan/borrower performance. It is mind boggling how much data mining/analysis you could do with those fields available.

You would find for e.g. that certain cities and areas of NZ default more than others, and/or sort by age-of-borrowers in arrears vs current, what are the results? If 50% of 20-29's go into arrears, I'm sorry but I'm not lending to that age bracket. And/or sort by monthly loan payment vs. percentage of borrowers income, its goes on and on. HM is sitting on all this data and I can't see the harm in empowering investors with the ability to draw our own conclusions from mining this data. If I was running a P2P platform it would be available from day one. Why wouldn't you? Give investors the ability to fine tune their investing strategy. Make a safe home for investment funds and it will flow in abundance.

On top of that I'd like to see/export the frequency and type of communication HM is having with borrowers in arrears so we can better predict the percentage of arrears that will convert to write-offs.

The current process is a black box. I have asked HM to let me know how long each of my arrears loans has been in arrears for. I still don't have an answer. come on this is fundamental info I feel I have a right to.

Still, I am an HM fan. They do more good than harm and should improve with time. Thanks HM

Great insight, thanks.

[777]

Has anyone tried downloading a report from the website today? New process emails a link but all I got was an unreadable mess.

Why fix something that works.

[mccollr]

I just downloaded a report. Clicked the link and it asked what programme I wanted to open the CSV file with. Excel is the one for this type of file. All data intact. Had to resize a few columns but all tickety boo.

[Art]

I'd love to be able to have the ability to export to xcel, every field/column that you can see in the "Loan details" and "Borrower details".
If you go to Reports>Loans and click on any LAI you have invested in - there are 2 tabs with 30 odd fields - after lots of sorting in xcel you would have some very valuable insights when compared to loan real loan/borrower performance. It is mind boggling how much data mining/analysis you could do with those fields available.

You would find for e.g. that certain cities and areas of NZ default more than others, and/or sort by age-of-borrowers in arrears vs current, what are the results? If 50% of 20-29's go into arrears, I'm sorry but I'm not lending to that age bracket. And/or sort by monthly loan payment vs. percentage of borrowers income, its goes on and on. HM is sitting on all this data and I can't see the harm in empowering investors with the ability to draw our own conclusions from mining this data. If I was running a P2P platform it would be available from day one. Why wouldn't you? Give investors the ability to fine tune their investing strategy. Make a safe home for investment funds and it will flow in abundance.

On top of that I'd like to see/export the frequency and type of communication HM is having with borrowers in arrears so we can better predict the percentage of arrears that will convert to write-offs.

The current process is a black box. I have asked HM to let me know how long each of my arrears loans has been in arrears for. I still don't have an answer. come on this is fundamental info I feel I have a right to.

Still, I am an HM fan. They do more good than harm and should improve with time. Thanks HM

Looks like you have got at least some of your wishes - 45 columns of data now! Time to update my spreadsheet to allow the import of this data.

[777]

I just downloaded a report. Clicked the link and it asked what programme I wanted to open the CSV file with. Excel is the one for this type of file. All data intact. Had to resize a few columns but all tickety boo.

Thanks. I don't get that option.

[davidpoole]

Yes I have asked for all loan and borrower data to be made exportable because if made available, one could analyse the data and make better investment decisions as a result. E.g. by doing a labourious manual check on all my arrears (by taking the age of borrowers of my loans from the website and matching to my exported loan's list - ridiculous to have to do this manually) I found the lowest age borowers made up the largest proportion of loans in arrears and visa versa for the older borrowers so I now invest accordingly but without having the data showing the age of borrower not in arrears it is kind of inconclusive too. Way too time consuming to do this on 100s of loans manually. Please give us the data Harmoney. I can't see any harm in us having access to it and I would expect it would be pretty simple to enable this ability from an IT perspective. I requested this a few months ago. No update from HM yet. As with many other enquires/requests I have made.

I think they may have just added this functionality... go to Reports > Investments > Loans > Export...

You will then receive a link by email with a .csv of all the borrower data for your loans - it includes Age Band, Marital Status, Residential Status, Time at Residence, Time at Employer, last payment date, etc (40+ columns..?)

Also, this is my first post, hello!

Edit: Someone beat me to it! oh well...

[davidpoole]

Has anyone tried downloading a report from the website today? New process emails a link but all I got was an unreadable mess.

Why fix something that works.

Thanks. I don't get that option.

This happened for me too (the file opened in the web browser (safari) rather than downloading the file and opening it in Excel).

Just save that page of 'unreadable' text and give it a .csv file extension. then you can open it with Excel..

[humvee]

Looks like you have got at least some of your wishes - 45 columns of data now! Time to update my spreadsheet to allow the import of this data.

Does anyone have the link to that site that processes the harmoney csv file and graphs then - I know it was posted somewhere in the last 100 pages....

I wonder if the site will be updated to make use of the new data

[777]

[/COLOR]

This happened for me too (the file opened in the web browser (safari) rather than downloading the file and opening it in Excel).

Just save that page of 'unreadable' text and give it a .csv file extension. then you can open it with Excel..

Thank you. Yes opened in safari for me as well but try as I might I was unable to save it with a .csv extension. That will be due to my limitations.

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