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[Closed] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
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Pridit
Private Ventures
#41 - 2015-10-07 00:01:45 UTC  |  Edited by: Pridit
Hello everyone,

This is just to inform you there will be downtime shortly, which I wouldn't anticipate taking more than a few hours. Interest will still accumulate during any time it would normally, if it does happen to go over 24 hours, you just may be unable to access the site or log in during this time or there could be other issues.

This is due to a distro change (due to incompatibilities with some packages) & PHP version upgrade (to make way for some future functionality) on the server. I have quite a few things planned that I'm currently working on but may not see the light of day for a few weeks. Alongside those changes will introduce some alterations to plans which I will make an in-depth post about nearer the time.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Cista2
EVE Museum
#42 - 2015-10-07 06:19:46 UTC
Don't like how this scheme goads investors into investing more and more to achieve higher interest rate.
Meanwhile the bank owner's own percentage profits will diminish the higher amounts he has to deal with, which is the traditional receipe for disaster.

My channel: "Signatures" -
Nouva MacGyver
Jedrzejczyk Integrated Capital
Minerva Exalt Holdings
#43 - 2015-10-07 06:41:46 UTC
Cista2 wrote:
Don't like how this scheme goads investors into investing more and more to achieve higher interest rate.
Meanwhile the bank owner's own percentage profits will diminish the higher amounts he has to deal with, which is the traditional receipe for disaster.


Cista, he has a post on the venture's website talking about this very concern some time back - I believe Pridit understands it's not something sustainable in the long run.
Pridit
Private Ventures
#44 - 2015-10-07 11:37:31 UTC
Cista2 wrote:
Don't like how this scheme goads investors into investing more and more to achieve higher interest rate.
Meanwhile the bank owner's own percentage profits will diminish the higher amounts he has to deal with, which is the traditional receipe for disaster.

Completely understandable concern and I did address this in a recent post. I don't think it was wise of me to incentivize investments that are too large especially since I received them. There will be changes to the plans in the near future to reflect this and to ensure the long-term sustainability of the service. I don't want to make a split second decision and would rather ease into the change.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Pridit
Private Ventures
#45 - 2015-10-14 03:29:21 UTC
Hey everyone, it's been a while since I last posted.

I'm pleased to announce I just made live a whole host of changes, these include collaterized loans, raffles and player <-> player ISK transfers. There has also been some changes now and in the future to the investment plans now that I have got these rolled out.

The full post is available here: http://private-ventures.co.uk/news/latest-update-3

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Cista2
EVE Museum
#46 - 2015-10-14 06:12:27 UTC  |  Edited by: Cista2
"I wouldn't foresee dropping it past that point unless there was a giant surge in activity and clients which I wouldn't imagine happening. "

Oh I can imagine that happening. Your rates are still improbably high for a bank, but it looks more solid already. Surge is coming, you should refrain from the "I wouldn't foresee" heroics and warn straightaway that furher rate reductions are in the future outlook :)

My channel: "Signatures" -
Nero Farway
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#47 - 2015-10-14 08:55:02 UTC  |  Edited by: Nero Farway
Pridit wrote:


I'm pleased to announce I just made live a whole host of changes, these include collaterized loans



Wait, your collateralized loans cost less in terms of interest than you pay your customers; and that at only 100% collateral. Not only is there a risk of the collateral losing value and the loan therefore becoming undercollateralized, you are also losing money.

Even with the new adjusted rates you still get less money for letting someone else play with the money, than you pay to your customers in interest. You are operating collateralized loans at a loss while also having the risk of the value of the collateral dropping below 100%.

I can only see 2 ways in which this can be profitable to you:

1.) You only accept collateral that is located in a major trade hub and is very actively traded on the market. You then sell of he collateral and use the proceeds for your usual business activities. When the loans runs out, you buy back the collateral on the market and hand is over.
That way you still have the risk of the price of the collateral changing at your expense, but you at least made some money with the collateral itself before taking the risk into account.
However, that would reduce the variety of items you could take for collateral,

or

2.) This is a marketing thing and will be adjusted later.
However, since your rates for collateralized payments are, which reasonable, not exactly low, there is not much room for raising the collateral rates. So in this case, I can only see further reduction of the interest payment for deposits as the solution.

Mabye I missed something, but this just doesn't feel profitable at all

Looking forward to your reply.


Edit: I just deposited some ISK again. When it was credited, I saw that a transfer costs 0.5% in fee. This is counterproductive as it adds more workload. People would just withdraw their money, which causes work for you, then send it to someone ingame who then makes another deposit.
So I don't see how the transfer feature either adds convenience at a reasonable price (which is 0 ISK, since the transfer doesn't involve any work on your site) or how it reduced workload for you (since people will just circumvent the feature due to cost).
I suggest not taking transfer fees at all.
On the other side, since there is no competition, I can understand trying this :P
illumed
Victory or Whatever
Nourv Gate Security Commission
#48 - 2015-10-14 12:30:35 UTC  |  Edited by: illumed
I was sad when illegal investments had to cut short and had high hopes for this fulfilling where illegal left off. As I bought into both "banks" equally cause why not.

The Initial cap of 50B of total investment with the plans you provided seemed alright to me, but now you are setting a cap for us investors to invest and lowering rates all within 10 days since I've signed up.
In less then 3 weeks too many changes and raises doubts, translucent and clear but why not stick with a single plan. Feels like its moved away from what it started out to be all in way to short of time.

From the first post 12 days ago when you wrote.
" Note that the current amount of investments has no weight on this article and it is not difficult to maintain for me."
and
"Don't worry, this isn't any announcement about dropping the interest rates. Not yet anyway. "
Confidence and lubing me up..

And now you've said.
"I am but one individual, keeping it this way is necessary to ensure commitment and trust. Introducing new people, while I'm sure could help sustain such figures would introduce too great a risk and potentially invoke the opportunity to tarnish any reputation or client base built from well over a month of operation and it's simply a risk I'm not willing to take."
and
"There will also unfortunately be a 2-3% reduction in interest rates across all plans at some point next week."



I was under the impression you were a successful trader who wanted more capital to trade with and also fancied yourself being an alternative bank to Illegal and enjoyed the development of the site as that's what you do for work. :)


Seemed fine for me, as I invested close to 10B. Now changing it to a 2.5 B cap, offering new products when your original product seems to change in no time and now offering gambling in the form of raffles?

I will be withdrawing and leaving in the cap of 2.5 and see what changes happen in another two weeks.

I will confirm once I received transfer and thank you in advance.

I would really have liked to see lower interest rates and a bank cap. And when people pull out isks, then theres a margin for more investment from current clients until the bank raises its cap.
Pridit
Private Ventures
#49 - 2015-10-14 17:20:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Pridit
@Nero Farway
While I have only just ventured into loans, I will be keeping a very close eye on it and ensuring the collateral is good with a low chance of sinking so the possibility of losing money becomes very slim. I will adjust or tinker with it in the future if it's not viable, or just outright remove the service if I can't make it work. Like I previously said I want to expand the service into much more than it currently is, and I think offering collaterized loans is a good start to branching out.

The 0.5% transfer fee adds no manual workload to me and is entirely automated, balance transfers is an optional feature that you are not obligated to use so I opted for a very minor tax on it to justify me putting it in. If a measly 0.5% gets circumvented, that's fine and I'm not going to try and prohibit it - it's just a tax on convenience. Some other services I've seen during my time researching also added a tax on withdrawals or strict periods where you could withdraw so I don't think I'm being unreasonable.

@illumed
I can understand your concern. Unfortunately the harsh truth is, the current rates with more or less no individual account cap isn't sustainable by just one individual indefinitely. It could only go one way, and I think I have been reasonable keeping it that way for over a month paying out almost 40m per day to some investors.

Note that I may increase the cap again, just because I'm making these changes doesn't mean they're set in stone forever. I just want to ensure I can run this service far into the future, a year or more. As I said before I intend to be around for the long haul. Part of the reason I have decided to offer loans and raffles is to expand the site, it's entirely optional to use these and I just wanted to give more functionality and draw in potential clients I otherwise wouldn't have.

@both Offering loans/raffles and a large section on the investment plans was floated in a recent news post which I assume you both saw yet I received no feedback on it then, only after it has just been implemented there seems to be concerns. I had to make the decisions alone and I did so for the viability of the service.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
illumed
Victory or Whatever
Nourv Gate Security Commission
#50 - 2015-10-14 18:49:01 UTC
Its a concern because initially you mentioned the bank would have a cap of 50B and you would evaluate and see about raising the banks cap if you could make use of it. If you have investors who filled your 50B bank cap, I was guessing would you stop taking new accounts unless you wanted to raise that cap even higher or when people withdrew or closed accounts.

Instead you set a hard cap on what investors can invest, lowering interest rates.
Also you added new products and services while changing the terms of the only product your clients to you for.

You only 'just venture' into this bank/project and you've nerfed the terms and added more products to a website.

I would rather have read on this thread about the banks gains in trades and the potential for taking more capital in and adding new projects. Its been too short of time with too many changes.


You wanna expand with more products, but haven't shown us even a months history with what we all signed up with.


Clients come with history and reputation.
As much as I like what your doing with the site, I feel like that is your product perhaps as you do development.
What happened to trading, taking in profits with updates and just paying interest?
I mean, do I really need to invest with 5 different char's to get up to 10B?
Why not just keep the hard cap of 50B or whatever you can manage and lower the rates if you can't pay what you sold us?
What would happen if 50 new clients signed up today all maxed out at 2.5B


Even Illegal considered adding new products to his venture, but wanted to wait 3-6 months to gain reputation.

Others have pointed out other faults, these are mine I suppose.



Pridit
Private Ventures
#51 - 2015-10-14 19:07:44 UTC
illumed wrote:
Its a concern because initially you mentioned the bank would have a cap of 50B and you would evaluate and see about raising the banks cap if you could make use of it. If you have investors who filled your 50B bank cap, I was guessing would you stop taking new accounts unless you wanted to raise that cap even higher or when people withdrew or closed accounts.

Instead you set a hard cap on what investors can invest, lowering interest rates.
Also you added new products and services while changing the terms of the only product your clients to you for.

You only 'just venture' into this bank/project and you've nerfed the terms and added more products to a website.

I would rather have read on this thread about the banks gains in trades and the potential for taking more capital in and adding new projects. Its been too short of time with too many changes.


You wanna expand with more products, but haven't shown us even a months history with what we all signed up with.


Clients come with history and reputation.
As much as I like what your doing with the site, I feel like that is your product perhaps as you do development.
What happened to trading, taking in profits with updates and just paying interest?
I mean, do I really need to invest with 5 different char's to get up to 10B?
Why not just keep the hard cap of 50B or whatever you can manage and lower the rates if you can't pay what you sold us?
What would happen if 50 new clients signed up today all maxed out at 2.5B


Even Illegal considered adding new products to his venture, but wanted to wait 3-6 months to gain reputation.

Others have pointed out other faults, these are mine I suppose.




The cap of 50b was always anticipated, it wasn't set in stone and I didn't say I wouldn't make any changes until we reached that figure. I want to open this service up to anyone who is interested so closing registration is a poor option and isn't a road I would go down so instead I implemented an interest cap. They've been "nerfed" to ensure the future sustainability of the service for hopefully years to come, which I hope you will see by the time we get there.

Even though I have done research into other banks, their "waiting" period has no basis for my own. If you had any issue with this you should have voiced your concern during the development stage when I was more in a position to make radical changes or even prevent them going live. "Why didn't you do this" or you "should have done" doesn't help me at this stage right after making everything live and these changes are here to stay.

If you don't agree with my methods I can only offer an apology but everything I have done is to appeal to more players who may not be interested in investments while also ensuring the long term viability of the service so I can keep it going. Why should I restrict a service that can evolve into a bit more just to investments? That's a narrow minded very limited view, and I'd rather make strides to widen the services I offer.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Amarr Citizen 155
Nordar Innovations.
#52 - 2015-10-15 03:05:15 UTC
There are tons of obvious issues with banking in Eve so I'll leave those out for not and concentrate on the biggest issue. You're seem to be creating your plan as you go along instead of coming up with a plan and making adjustments as needed. If we just look at the words you use:

"ballpark'
"somewhere around"
"may implement"
"could be"
"I don't really know about audits or who provides them"


Also in your updates you hint at plans and ideas but say they are a ways out, then a week later you implement them and more. I honestly don't think you're doing this on purpose but instead you just haven't done your research and you haven't really planned out the business side. I think you're top heavy on tech knowledge without a basic foundation of how the business side of banking works.

Others have mentioned your rates for loans returning a loss compared to your interest rates on accounts and while I would agree there is something to be said for the marketing side of taking an initial small loss to garner interest so that you can make adjustments later to turn a profit, after you have people used to coming to you for loans. Your collateral requirements are way off though and I don't think the marketing side I just mentioned is something you did on purpose but rather by accident. Again, I think you lack the business knowledge required for this idea to be sustainable.

If it were me and I didn't already know that running a bank was a terrible idea, I would seek out a couple of individuals with the business knowledge to assist you. Create an advisory board.
Pridit
Private Ventures
#53 - 2015-10-15 03:37:36 UTC  |  Edited by: Pridit
Amarr Citizen 155 wrote:
There are tons of obvious issues with banking in Eve so I'll leave those out for not and concentrate on the biggest issue. You're seem to be creating your plan as you go along instead of coming up with a plan and making adjustments as needed. If we just look at the words you use:

"ballpark'
"somewhere around"
"may implement"
"could be"
"I don't really know about audits or who provides them"


Also in your updates you hint at plans and ideas but say they are a ways out, then a week later you implement them and more. I honestly don't think you're doing this on purpose but instead you just haven't done your research and you haven't really planned out the business side. I think you're top heavy on tech knowledge without a basic foundation of how the business side of banking works.

Others have mentioned your rates for loans returning a loss compared to your interest rates on accounts and while I would agree there is something to be said for the marketing side of taking an initial small loss to garner interest so that you can make adjustments later to turn a profit, after you have people used to coming to you for loans. Your collateral requirements are way off though and I don't think the marketing side I just mentioned is something you did on purpose but rather by accident. Again, I think you lack the business knowledge required for this idea to be sustainable.

If it were me and I didn't already know that running a bank was a terrible idea, I would seek out a couple of individuals with the business knowledge to assist you. Create an advisory board.

Thanks for the feedback, I do agree with you on some points especially that this was a bit sudden - it really wasn't my intention, I just wanted to make those changes after I had implemented the features I was working on. I finished what I was working on sooner than I expected to so I went live with the change and revised plans. I'm offering a week grace period, because of how sudden this all was, where I am retaining the rates but as mentioned these will drop as well.

As of right now, yes, loans are operating at a loss as I wanted to offer competitive rates but there is a very small pocket of allowance for these and I anticipate them eventually falling in line with the interest rates in the future so I can begin operating them at a profit once I have that solid client foundation. Right now profit margins on any services I run like this are not my main priority as I can recoup any shortfalls through the original reason I started the service, trading. Loans is something very new and wasn't initially something I was considering doing but as mentioned I want to appeal to a broader audience and I think this is a good step towards that. I am open to any feedback and will tinker with them when I feel I have to.

I have tried to seek an audit, I inquired with both Chribba and Grendell on the matter but they both refused stating it was not something they provided and were unable to recommend anyone they saw fit to perform the audit. I would still like one, but I'm not going to actively chase it anymore. If you or anyone else has recommendations for anyone who can perform an audit, do let me know.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Nouva MacGyver
Jedrzejczyk Integrated Capital
Minerva Exalt Holdings
#54 - 2015-10-15 14:07:30 UTC
I actually clicked around the raffles portion just to see how the transaction gets processed. I was half expecting another confirmation step of sorts after pressing Purchase Ticket.

In any case, I can understand your position with the changes and the timing it has been implemented- we as investors have not exactly given you enough public feedback (or rather, public feedback in a timely manner) when all of the information was trickling in. Most of it only came after the fact. The upside is there is now a few key things mentioned we can look at:

- Possibly stopping inflow for the moment to help yourself adjust to the most recent changes you've made and putting a stop-gap for any potential issues that may arise later, and at the same time analyze the feedback provided thus far.
- Continue seeking out reputable individuals for consultation and an audit on how the business side of things are holding up for investors' confidence. (My only personal experience for audits, etc is with Vaerah Vahrokha from many years back, but he may be busy and I'm not sure whether VV even does audits anymore)
- On success of the previous point, adjusting and streamlining the currently available services to be more sustainable for the long term. If it comes down to it, be prepared to scrap features if it is for the greater good.

I also personally believe you have good intentions thus far, some of these just require a bit more detailed reporting (you may want to consider an ongoing monthly trade/business report going forward), some tweaks here and there, and those sweet-spot in and out percentages to keep everything healthy for yourself with reasonably thought out returns for your clients for the long term.

The reason I invested is because I'm quite taken in by the technical execution of your website, and as a fellow trader I understand the kind of returns one could accumulate with X amount of funds, but at the end of the day the accounting has to be right when you have people invested, and that is the one of the key things that will future-proof any plans going forward.
Sgt Felix
Zealot's
Sigma Grindset
#55 - 2015-10-16 10:24:04 UTC
well just like to say I got my 1.2b isk back only took 10 mins to get in game so good on him ayBig smile
Pridit
Private Ventures
#56 - 2015-10-21 12:24:00 UTC
As mentioned last week I have now gone ahead with the revised plans. I have also made a new post addressing some concerns raised in the thread since the introduction of the changes and how I intend to go about it in the future. Please let me know if you have any further feedback.

The full post is available here: http://private-ventures.co.uk/news/revised-plans-4

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Pridit
Private Ventures
#57 - 2015-10-24 03:42:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Pridit
Another short update; SSO is now in, existing accounts can make use of it and any new accounts can also be created by it - let me know if you encounter any issues with it. Very convenient all around so hopefully some people can make use of it. I have also got rid of usernames, so you now log in with your email instead of username. Similarly for any ISK transfers you enter in a character name instead of account name. This should make it much more straight forward.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Pridit
Private Ventures
#58 - 2015-11-09 03:40:47 UTC
Hi everyone,

Unfortunately I will be closing the service down for an unspecified period of time. I fully intend on bringing it back in the near future as well as with a framework. I've spent too long working on the system to just permanently end it here. I'm focusing on other projects outside of EVE so no longer have the time to maintain or develop the system as I would like to at this time but once I have I will be making it live again as my need for capital will still be abundant.

Everyone still invested has had their ISK plus any interest generated returned to them. I've paid out around 4.1B in interest since the service started so I hope it's been profitable and worthwhile for everyone thus far. Though the service did gain traction through MD, it's unlikely I will be advertising the system here in the future when it does return. If you want to be notified when the service returns, join the "Private Ventures" mailing list and I'll inform anyone on it when it's live again.

Huge thanks to everyone who placed their trust in me and used the service. I will absolutely be bringing the service back and I'm looking forward to bringing it back in better shape.

[PITVE] Private Ventures - Investments › Loans › Raffles
Illegal Spokeswoman
Doomheim
#59 - 2015-11-09 03:49:07 UTC
Sorry to see you go hope it's nothing serious. I look forward to your return.

<3

II

★ Illegal Investments ★ Banking ★
Spruillo
Lord Narg Corporation
#60 - 2015-11-09 04:59:08 UTC
Real traders dont eed loans.

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