On Monday, Australia-based online lender SocietyOne announced it not only celebrated its five year anniversary, it has also surpassed $300 million in total originations. The platform revealed it advanced over $100 million of new lending during the first half of 2017 and its loan book increased by $60 million over the past six months, now standing at $189 million.
SocietyOne reported that during the first half of 2017 it saw a record amount of committed funds made available by investor funders with new mandates secured from existing and new institutions and high net worth individuals, taking the total to 315 funders and currently available funding of $68.3 million as at June 30th. While sharing details about the milestone, SocietyOne’s CEO and managing director, Jason Yetton, stated:
“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 $70 million at the start of January 2016 to more than $300 million over the last 18 months. This is a testament to the great work of our 90 people who have helped make it happen for our borrowers and investor funders since we started lending almost five years ago. It’s particularly pleasing to see this one team effort recognised with three major awards over the past couple of months including the Best Innovative Retail Product at the 2017 Australian Retail Banking Awards.”
Yetton went on to add:
“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 1 the proposal to give consumers more control of their data and 72% saying banks should share that information.”