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We’re excited to announce the most recent changes to our auto bidding tool, BidPal.For years lenders have used BidPal to help them manage their Rebs lending portfolio, helping them invest in a wide range of loans whilst saving them valuable time, and now we’ve improved it to make managing your lending account even easier and to allow you to make more tailored auto lending decisions.

What is BidPal?

BidPal is our automated lending tool, that auto applies bids on behalf of lenders as and when a new loan is listed that meets their pre-set lending criteria. This means lenders that have set up BidPal do not need to log in each time a new loan is listed to make a bid.

What’s New?

Inclusion and Exclusion Options

Previously the preferences available for lenders to set were limited to industry sector and risk rating. We’ve now extended the options available to lenders, allowing you to make more defined bidding preferences to suit your lending appetite. You will now be able to choose to include or exclude certain regions that you do or do not want to lend to.

Bid or Buy

The new BidPal will also include an option to auto-buy loans on the Secondary Marketplace as well as bid on the Primary Marketplace. Lenders may choose to set one or the other or both auto-bidding options. Where a lender chooses to buy micro loans from the Secondary Marketplace, they will be buying micro loans that other lenders are selling on. These are loans that have already been funded via the Primary Marketplace. When loan parts become available that match your buying preferences and where you have sufficient Available Balance, these micro loans will be automatically bought and added to your loan portfolio. We’ve also introduced new rules that  allows users more flexibility over their BidPal criteria. Over time, we hope to further expand on the data options that a lender can set for their lending rules. Currently lenders can configure the settings such as:

• Whether you want to exclude / include loans where the loan is behind on repayments
• Targeting the purchase of micro loans in a specific business
• Whether you want to exclude / include loans being sold at certain premiums / discounts by other lenders
• Choosing the risk ratings you want to buy or avoid.

The buy logic is triggered when a user sells their microloan(s), there is now a 'clearing process' to check if the microloan meets the buy requirements of another user and where it does, the purchase will occur instantly. This feature allows lenders to grow a diversified portfolio quickly while simultaneously bringing an increase in liquidity to the platform. When selling microloans, you may notice a message "1 of 1 microloans sold." When you see this, another lender's BidPal Buy function has purchased your microloan automatically.

What BidPal Does Not Do…

BidPal does not guarantee that all your funds will always be lent out, that you will never encounter a default or that your account will deliver a set interest rate. Available funds are only lent out to a pre-set proportion of your lending portfolio, you can alter all this in the settings. If your funds are auto bid on a loan, there is no guarantee that you will not be outbid, if you are outbid you will be alerted (according to your notification settings), and will be able to login and rebid should you choose. Lending to businesses carries the risk of default. If a business fails to repay a loan you could lose all or part of your capital. Therefore you should carefully consider how best to mitigate these risks, consider perhaps divesting via the secondary market or reviewing the performance of the various loan risk ratings and reviewing your Bidpal settings regularly. Whilst BidPal will auto bid at the highest rate available on a loan, it does not guarantee a set return on any single loan or on your portfolio.

Managing your Lending Portfolio

As a lender, lending to businesses, you should be aware of the risks involved in lending. Understanding the risks is the first step to building a strong loan investment portfolio through careful management. Whilst BidPal reduces the need to log in as regularly to ensure that your funds are working for you, lenders should still ensure that they are monitoring their lending account to ensure that it is performing to their expectations and to regularly review their investment strategy depending on the performance of their investments.

Find out more about managing your lending portfolio on our platform by reading our helpful articles in the Lender Library.

For more information on BidPal please look at our FAQs or email support@rebuildingsociety.com.