Assetz Capital to upgrade systems to address account locking issues
ASSETZ Capital has attributed account display issues to a high level of traffic on its website, following an ISA-led increase in investor demand.
Several investors have taken to the P2P Independent Forum to express concerns about their investments or account details not showing up.
Users say the peer-to-peer secured business lender – which revamped its website at the end of last year – often displays a page saying the servers are busy.
“It seems every single time and it usually takes three or four attempts to invest my spare funds,” one user said.
“I thought the recent updates were supposed to have improved things?”
Another user, who also had to keep refreshing pages to access their account, said it was “unfortunate timing with the ISA launch, not a great first impression.”
A representative for Assetz told users on the forum that the systems are being changed due to the high level of data on the site, but said the update would not be complete until February.
“Whenever a loan repayment is processed or there’s a large sale on the aftermarket the existing process ends up locking thousands of lender accounts at once to ensure the transaction completes as a whole or not at all,” the post said.
“As the site has grown in both size and complexity that’s led to more and more data being processed at once taking a longer and longer period of time.”
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The representative explained that whilst those accounts are locked it can end up blocking the user dashboard pages that display account balances.
“On top of that because we end up with lots of those longish running processes running in parallel they occasionally clash with a deadlock causing the database to cancel them, so the system then has to retry those transactions leading to more account locking and time,” the spokesperson said.
“The rewrite of those systems is designed to massively reduce the size of those transactions and eliminate as many of the locks and blocks as possible.
“This update is currently scheduled to go live in February but is still somewhat fluid due to the complexity and amount of work required.”
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Stuart Law, chief executive of Assetz Capital, said the issue was due to the level of traffic on the platform, and suggested there would be fixes sooner than next month.
“We have seen huge growth in demand for our investments recently and, in particular, the ISA, which is already reaching as many applications as the entire industry saw accounts opened in the 16/17 tax year,” he said.
“We are currently prioritising a system upgrade and are looking to make notable improvements within the next couple of days to match this demand.”