SocietyOne is radically changing the landscape of financial services in Australia. Since our foundation four years ago, we have gone from a standing start to providing more than $130 million in loans to customers
As well as being the pioneer of marketplace (or ‘peer-to-peer’) lending in Australia we are also the largest provider of personal loans in the marketplace sector.
Over that time, we have evolved from a small online start-up to a scaled up, new generation digital financial services company that is loosening the stranglehold the traditional banks have on the consumer finance market, estimated by APRA to be $100 billion in size (excluding housing).
While total lending is currently small by comparison to the banks, we are growing - and rapidly. Our target is to take a 2-3 per cent share of this market over the next five years and grow our customer numbers to 100,000.
That’s ambitious and it’s bold. But after witnessing two consecutive periods of ten-fold growth over the last two years to take us to $130 million in loans and matching finance – of which $50 million was made in the first six months of 2016 alone - we believe that it is more than achievable.
We are doing that by offering a completely new and different approach to lending which uses risk-based pricing to match the needs of borrowers to the investment requirements of our investors who finance loans.
We're able to offer unsecured personal loans to individuals, and loans to farmers which are uniquely secured against livestock.
This is the lending revolution that connects borrowers and lenders in a marketplace and is all made possible by our world-class ClearMatch technology platform.
ClearMatch changes the laborious, time-consuming, bureaucratic and stressful loan application process which just as often leads to a “no” for the customers of a traditional bank as it does to a “yes”.
First, we run a “soft” online credit check for our customers that doesn’t affect their credit rating, so we can see if they’re likely to qualify for a loan before they apply. We then walk them through a simple online application process. If the application is successful, customers are offered a fixed rate loan, tailored to their individual credit worthiness, with the money usually deposited in their accounts within 48 hours.
Compare that to the complicated and drawn-out approach of the traditional banks and it’s easy to see why customers prefer to do business with us as demonstrated by our Net Promoter Score of 82 and a customer product-rated review rating of 4.7 out of 5 on productreview.com.au.
Our investor lenders like us too, with investment returns of between 8 and 10 per cent since January 2013 and default rates (payment defaults and impaired loans) of just 77 basis points (0.77%) across the whole loan portfolio.
It all adds up to a superior customer experience created by Australia’s pioneering and leading player in marketplace lending. A company of 80 people working as one team to provide our customers with an opportunity to change their worlds and achieve their financial dreams – and ours too.
