We were never going to keep everyone happy in this round. Existing investors demanded that their pre-emption right was respected. People who missed out in the last round thought that they should get first dibs. Newer customers thought that they should get the first shot because they hadn’t previously had any opportunity to invest.
A ballot on the subject even ended up split 50:50:
We chose a solution that we thought was fairest overall and minimised the amount of frustration (eg, not making people take time off work to click really fast on a website that was crashing). I think the fact that, broadly speaking, everyone is equally annoyed shows that we chose a relatively fair solution.
I hope there will be more crowdfunding in future, and we may explore ways of taking more than the €5m EU annual cap. I think it would be amazing if we could be a bank that was totally funded by our customers.