Marketplace lender SocietyOne has broken through $300m in originated loans as it ramps up to celebrate its fifth year in business.
The firm advanced more than $100m of new lending in the first half of this year bringing in $45m in the first quarter and $57m in the second. This was an increase of 67.2% from the $61m originated during the first half of last year.
SocietyOne’s loan book also grew by $60m during these six months and now stands at $189m.
Additionally, there has been a record amount of committed funds made available by investor funders in the first half of this year with mandates from new and existing institutions as well as high net worth individuals. SocietyOne had 315 funders and available funding of $68.3m as of 30 June 2017.
These results reflect the strong momentum of the business, SocietyOne CEO and managing director Jason Yetton said.
“Growing interest from borrowers and investor funders over the past 12 months is proof that our proposition of offering a better deal than the major banks and providing investors attractive risk-adjusted returns is making a real different in the marketplace for personal loans.
“As a result, our customers have now driven six successive quarters of strong growth. This has taken our total originated lending from $70m at the start of January 2016 to more than $300m over the last 18 months.”
SocietyOne's average loan size is just over $22,000 per customer, SocietyOne spokesperson Danny John told
Australian Broker.
“This has gone up slightly since we increased the maximum customers can borrow from $35,000 to $50,000 at the start of this year to compete head on with the offerings of the big four banks and the other major lenders in the market.”
Interest in SocietyOne has been driven by a huge awareness campaign over the past year, John added.
“We stepped up our marketing last year with the launch of our first national TV brand campaign during the Rio Olympics, and subsequent digital marketing campaigns such as 'Make It Happen' which have helped us establish our name amongst the public,” he said.
“Through GetCreditScore.com.au, a joint venture company between SocietyOne and Equifax, there's also been growing interest in people finding out their credit histories and scores to see if they can get a better deal than the one rate fits all approach of the big banks. GetCreditScore.com.au has now given away more than 1.4 million free scores, up from 850,000 scores at the end of June last year.”
This growth has also been due to the hard work of the firm’s 90 team members in the five years since establishment, Yetton said.
“Over the past 12 months we have had more than 140,000 Australians enquire about a loan with SocietyOne which shows that consumers are responding in large numbers to the idea they can leverage their good credit history to get a better deal.
“This has been underlined by the strong support of our customers for the government’s open banking and comprehensive credit reporting reforms with 88% of respondents backing the proposal to give consumers more control of their data and 72% saying banks should share that information.”
While John would not make any specific forecasts for the rest of the year, he said SocietyOne was looking forwards to continuing the strong growth seen over the past year into the months ahead.
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