The Zopa loan book glossary

As there’s so much detail in there, we thought it would be useful for our investors to have a go-to glossary of terms to help you understand what everything means.

Due to our recent platform upgrade, we’ve removed some columns, while other column names and positions have changed. Therefore, we’ve updated your loan book glossary to reflect this. Below you’ll find definitions for the columns as they appear in your loan book, running left to right.

Loan ID

This is the unique code which helps us to identify the individual loans you have invested in. If you have a question about a specific loan, you can use this code to identify it.

Borrower ID

This is the unique code which helps us to identify the individual borrowers whose loans you have invested in.

Product

This tells you which Zopa investment product this loan is linked to. For example, INVESTMENT/CORE, represents a loan in a Core investment and ISA/PLUS would be a loan that's part of a Plus Innovative Finance ISA.

Acquired

This is the date on which you were matched with this loan.

Market

Refers to the risk market of the borrower. Every borrower that we approve is assigned to a risk market based on their likelihood of paying back their loan which is then reflected in the interest rate on offer. The profiles range from A to E. Our A borrowers are the most reliable and E the riskiest. Find more on our risk markets and expected returns page.

Type of loan

This details the type of loan you have invested in and will either be ‘unsecured’, for unsecured personal loans, or ‘secured’, for secured loans. The majority of our loans are unsecured. This means they are not secured against an asset.

‘Secured’ means that if the loan goes into default, the asset – for example, a car -- can be sold to try and cover the remaining balance of the loan. We no longer match investors with new secured loans but you may have some in your portfolio.

There is one other key difference between these types of loans at Zopa. An unsecured personal loan will go into default after four months of missed payments. Our secured car loans default after three months of missed payments.

Term

This is the total lifetime of the loan in months. So, for a one year loan, you’ll see 12.

Loan size

This is the total value of the individual loan in question when it was originated. Because of the way we diversify your money, your investment will make up a portion of the total loan size.

Loan status

This refers to the status of the money which has been borrowed. Below are the possible statuses you could see:

• Active – The funds have been received by the borrower. This is an active loan that is paying on time.

• Closed – The loan has been fully repaid, covered by safeguard or sold to other investors. Learn more about the Safeguard provision fund, which was retired in 2017.

• Late – One or more payments have been missed on a loan. Our collections team will be following up with the borrower or an arrangement has already been made for them to pay a reduced regular amount. This can include borrowers impacted by the Coronavirus, including those who have returned to contractual payments, but not yet paid off the arrears built up during their payment freeze or reduced payment plan.

• Default – An unsecured personal loan that has four months of missed payments is classed as defaulted. A secured loan that has three months of missed payments will be classed as defaulted.

• Settled – This is when borrower is unable to repay in full, but can repay a certain percentage of their debt with a lump sum on a loan which has defaulted

• Deceased – This state is shown if a borrower dies before paying off their loan

• Sold – This is a loan that's no longer in your portfolio as its been included in a loan sale. Loans that were previously purchased by Safeguard are also included in this category.

• Transferred – These are loans that have been transferred out of your portfolio by our Customer Service team for a specific reason that you or the customer service team have flagged.

Borrower origination fee

This is a fee, usually referred to as an origination fee, that is calculated upfront and then added to the total of the loan.

Borrower rate

This is the interest rate that borrowers pay on the total outstanding balance of the loan before the loan servicing fee is taken off.

Loan servicing fee

This is the loan servicing fee applied to this particular loan. The loan servicing fee is deducted directly from each borrower repayment before the principal and interest is passed on to investors. The cost of the loan servicing fee may vary between investment products. You can find out more about our fees here

Investor rate

This is the borrower rate minus the loan servicing fee. It is the interest rate that you, as the investor, receive.

Transaction price

This is the price that the loan was bought for from the secondary market. If these fields are empty, it means they were not bought from the secondary market

Transaction date

This is the date that the loan was bought from the secondary market.

Amount invested

This is the amount you initially invested in this particular loan.

Capital outstanding

This is the amount of your initial investment that is remaining on the loan. Please note, it will also show the amount of capital left on defaulted loans which may not be repaid to you and is not included in your outstanding balance.

Interest outstanding

This is the amount of interest you are still due to earn over the lifetime of this loan. This amount assumes that the borrower sticks to their repayment schedule and loan term. If the borrower repays their loan early, then the total interest you receive will be less than this. If the borrower repays their loan late it will take longer for you to receive the interest.

Amount repaid

This is the total amount that has been repaid to you so far on this loan, including both capital and interest repayments.

Capital repaid

This shows you how much of the initial amount you invested in this loan has been repaid to you so far.

Interest repaid

This is the total amount of interest you have earned so far from this loan.

Percent repaid

This is the percentage of your investment in this loan which has been repaid so far.

Amount in arrears

This is the total value of missed payments on the loan. So, if the borrower has missed two payments of £1, the amount in arrears will be £2.

Please note, borrowers on a Coronavirus payment freeze or reduced payment plan will also have the payments they miss during their arrangement recorded in this column.

Days in arrears

This is the amount of time in days that a loan has been in arrears, from the date that the borrower missed their first repayment until today.

Default date

This is the date on which this loan went into default.

Loan value

This is the amount of your initial investment in this loan which is still due to be repaid to you over the remaining term of the loan. If the loan has defaulted this will show as 0.

Monthly repayment amount

This is the amount you should receive in repayments from this loan each month but it may vary if borrower decides to pay off their loan early.

Loan start date

This is the date on which the loan started. You will see a different date here to what appears in the ‘acquired’ column if your loan was bought on the secondary market. That’s because the loan will have officially started before you picked it up.

Loan end date

This is the date on which this loan is contracted to end. However, some loans might be paid off early, or end up repaying after this point if they’ve been on a Coronavirus payment freeze or reduced payment plan.

Loan purpose

This is the reason the borrower has given for taking out the loan. From home improvements to wedding expenses, you can see how your investment is making a difference.

COVID arrangements

This column helps you to identify if a loan has been impacted by the Coronavirus and placed on a payment freeze or reduced payment plan. If this is the case and the borrower has not paid off the arrears built up during their arrangement, the column value will show as TRUE. Please note, some of the loans that show TRUE may have already returned to normal contractual payments but haven’t yet paid off their arrears yet.

While we work to improve this, there is a way to check whether a loan marked as Coronavirus-impacted has finished it’s payment freeze and is at risk of default. However it requires a little work on your side. What you can do is check the “amount in arrears” column which shows the amount of missed payments and compare this to the “Monthly repayment amount” column, which shows the monthly contractual repayment amount. As an example, if the loan is £9 in arrears and is supposed to pay back £1 per month, you can conclude it’s passed its six month freeze and is in true arrears, so at risk of default.