The Latest Major Payday Lender Closures
MiniCredit had been active since 2008 and they had put together a quality loan product, that was only let down by an excessive transmission fee of £19.50. They did offer promo codes, but this reduced their interest and not their payout fee. Even before they had closed, there was a few issues creeping up. Rather than the flexible term span of 1 to 42 days, they had updated to force a monthly repayment. They did also previously trade 7/7 days, but later changed to close on Sundays. Their announcement came before the cap came in, but this would have been the central reason why they were unable to continue trading online.
The next major closure is Cash Genie that was always one of the UK’s most memorable online lending brands. They were known to be one of the most profitable payday lenders and an acquisition by EZCorp Inc showed the intent that they could go on to challenge the industry frontrunners. Shortly before closure, they removed the requirement of a fast funding fee, but obviously they just couldn’t cut back on interest to meet the required 0.8% daily limit. Both Cash Genie and MiniCredit could be considered as the major payday loan closures. There were however other well known companies that took the decision to bow out such as Vivus.
The Vivus owner (4Finance Group) trades in a dozen countries across Europe. They arrived locally back in 2012 when they pitched a free payday loan for all new customers. There was lots of potential with this lender, but they could never bring much of a challenge to lenders like Wonga, who they are interestingly battling out for dominance with over in the emerging Polish Sector. Another international player no longer active is Speedy Cash who have 23 high street stores. These outlets will remain open, but they have now stopped lending online to UK residents. You can still in essence use them through WageDayAdvance that is now owned by them.
The Cheque Centre has also stopped trading on the web although this was a while back and QuickQuid FlexCredit has now gone. Seeing FlexCredit close wasn’t too much of a surprise since their owner has Pounds to Pocket filling the same type of role for them in the instalment sector. Some other notable firms that have closed includes the likes of Full Pocket and Liquid Advance. There are many more known, but it will take time to gather data on everyone that we have introduced on the site. Many firms have remained active, but they have completely changed their repayment structures. The biggest change for the better has certainly been seen with MyJar.
They auto-approve new cash requests and so can be used at any time that any funds are required by their users. The problem over their history has been that they only offered a single fixed repayment. However, you can now choose any term of choice between 1 and 90 days (paying 0.8% daily). Peachy and Sunny who have been advertising extensively in recent years have also made significant changes to their products and Swift Sterling has now moved from monthly to instalments. The idea will be to cover every known closure and change once we have given it some time for the dust to settle with the new regulations.
