SocietyOne chief executive Jason Yetton, a former senior Westpac banker newly hired in March, shared some exciting updates with the Sydney Morning Herald: since the beginning of 2016, the Australian P2P lender has arranged AUS$50 million in personal loans on its online platform, nearly double the AUS$26 million of new lending in the December half of last year, and 10 times the AUS$5 million from the corresponding period of 2015. As a result of this growth, Yetton said SocietyOne‘s total portfolio of outstanding personal loans was almost $100 million, or about 0.5 per cent of the $20 billion personal loan market.
While he conceded the growth was occurring from a very low base and its market share remains small, Yetton said the uptick showed SocietyOne was starting to loosen the “stranglehold” banks have on unsecured consumer lending, according to the SMH.
“We readily admit that our current lending volume is still a small sum in the context of a $20 billion personal loan market which itself is one fifth of the overall consumer finance market in Australia,” Yetton, the Stone & Chalk mentor, explained. “My point, though, is that we now have a solid base from which we can grow and meet our ambitious target of taking a 2 to 3 per cent share of that $100 billion market by 2020-21.”
Backed by investors including Westpac and companies owned by Kerry Stokes, Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer, SocietyOne only accepts money from institutional and sophisticated investors; Yetton said SocietyOne had created a “community of funders” which included various customer-owned lenders, according to SMH. Yetton aims to distribute SocietyOne’s loans to a much wider range of borrowers – the platforms has lent to around 5000 borrowers, with an average loan size of $20,000. SocietyOne’s unsecured personal loans range from $5,000 to $35,000, with a minimum loan term of 2 years and maximum loan term of 5 years with flexible loan terms of 2, 3 or 5 years.
