SocietyOne tops $300 million in loans

SocietyOne tops $300 million in loans

SocietyOne's impressive growth since launching 5 years ago is a clear indication of the increasing strength of peer-to-peer loans.

SocietyOne announced that its total loans arranged since it launched in 2012 have exceeded $300 million, with new lending in the first half of 2017 up an impressive 67 per cent on last year.

In its fifth year SocietyOne reported that its loan book had increased by $60 million over the past six months to $189 million and they had advanced over $100 million of new loans, up 67% on last year.

SocietyOne's CEO and managing director Jason Yetton said that the results reflected the strong business momentum.

"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 with attractive risk-adjusted returns is making a real difference in the marketplace for personal loans," he 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 that they can leverage their good credit history to get a better deal."

SocietyOne's combined lending of $45 million in Q1 2017 and $57 million in Q2 2017 resulted in a year-on-year growth of almost 70% for the six-month period ending 30th June 2017. This compares to $61 million of new lending in the first half of 2016.

Rival P2P lender RateSetter has also funded about $130 million of loans since its inception in late 2014, according to its website, a figure that has roughly doubled since December.

Yetton says that part of this growth is due to the open banking reforms outlined by the government in the budget.

"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."