How to Recognise a Reliable Payday Lender: 3 Tell-tale Signs

  • by: Kelly Tate
  • January 29, 2020
  • Advice
How to Recognise a Reliable Payday Lender: 3 Tell-tale Signs

Payday loans have been a cause for both controversy and relief for millions of Brits for decades now, but things have changed a lot recently. With the FCA tightening its clamps around payday loans and their exorbitant interest rates, a number of big names in the business have either closed shop already, or are about to soon.

This leaves a gap for a lot of shady lenders to take hold of the desperate millions who rely on payday loans heavily. To protect yourself from such predatory lenders, and identify the legal and responsible ones, here are five tell-tale signs to tell them apart from the rest.

Clarity of Information About Them

The rules here are simple, if you don’t know who they are and where they are coming from, how can you trust them? Look for the “about us” page and see the information they have provided about them. Contact them from the contact information provided and ask your questions before finalising anything. If the lender is genuine, the information should be authentic and the contact experience smooth.

Clarity of Loan Details

This is the most important part which sets the authentic lenders apart from the fraudsters. If a short-term lender is genuine, they will make all information about the loan crystal clear for you to understand, even before you ask them for it. For example, if you visit the LoanPig website, which is a trusted Sunny loan alternative, they have all information regarding interest rates, total payable amounts and the EMI in respect to the loan amount and the tenure right on their home page. That’s pretty much what you should expect from any genuine payday lender.

Look for Security on the Payment Webpage

It is possible to be aware of basic cyber safety measures without being a techie. All one needs to do is look for the following signs:

  • The web address should begin with a https:// instead of http://
  • There should be 128-bit or even 256-bit SSL encryption on the transaction pages
  • If you see a padlock sign on the left of the page address, it’s a sign of security

As long as the payday lender’s website has these boxes checked, it means that they care about customer data safety and security of their financial information, just as responsible lenders should. They may even have a data privacy platform from somewhere like Terratrue in place so that they can ensure that they remain consistently compliant throughout the whole business.

Finally, we have the legality of the lender to consider, which in most cases is almost a guaranteed fact if the lender meets all the requirements already stated. However, there is a way to be absolutely sure; if your payday lender is authentic, they will have registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and they should have a publicly available Financial Services Register Number for verifying the same.

You can never be too careful when taking out an online loan, but these are all proven methods nonetheless. Provided your lender checks out on all these points, you have found yourself a reliable lending business after all.

Kelly Tate
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