Fair4All Finance invests £5m in award winning affordable lender Salad
Fair4All Finance has announced its £5m five year investment in Salad, an award winning social impact FinTech.
This is the third significant investment from Fair4All Finance’s Affordable Credit Scale Up Programme, designed to increase the supply of fair and affordable credit for people in financially vulnerable circumstances.
Salad offers two complementary products, both underpinned by innovative, proprietary technology. They use Open Banking data, rather than traditional credit scores, to lend responsibly to public sector workers that might otherwise be reliant on unaffordable payday loans. Loans are repaid either via Salary Deduction, through partnerships with employers or by Direct Debit.
Salad also offers ‘Salad Money Mind’, a free online tool that promotes financial resilience through replaying spending behaviours and directing users to targeted sources of support.
Salad, alongside all the social purpose lenders Fair4All Finance supports, has signed up to the Affordable Credit Code of Good Practice – ensuring that customers are treated fairly.
This investment will be used in conjunction with Salad’s commercial funding. With this long term support, Salad will expand its offering and further reduce the cost of credit for its customers.
Sacha Romanovitch OBE, CEO of Fair4All Finance says:
‘We are impressed by Salad’s innovative approach to helping customers in vulnerable financial circumstances. Salad has grown quickly since it started lending in late 2019, with a strong focus on supporting lower paid public sector workers with loans of up to £1000 and the rollout of its free financial education tool.
‘Currently, three quarters of their borrowers are NHS workers in the lowest 40% of incomes and half of their borrowers have dependent children. We see Salad as a sustainable alternative to high-cost credit and believe that with our support they have great potential to scale their affordable lending.’
Tim Rooney, CEO of Salad says:
‘Since launch we have provided fast, fair and truly affordable loans to over six thousand lower paid public sector workers across the UK. Harnessing Open Banking data is a far superior method to evidence affordability for customers with poor or impaired credit scores and this is reflected in our outstanding performance to date. Fair4All Finance share our aspiration of developing a sustainable mid-cost credit market and we are delighted to be working with them.’
About Fair4All Finance
Fair4All Finance is a not-for-profit organisation founded in early 2019 to improve the financial wellbeing of people in vulnerable circumstances by increasing access to fair, affordable and appropriate financial products and services.
There are over 14m people in the UK in vulnerable financial circumstances, who are poorly served or unfairly excluded from consumer credit markets. That’s more than a quarter of all adults in the UK. This number has risen by 3.5m people over the past 18 months due to the challenges and impact of Covid-19, and the withdrawal from the market of several regulated high-cost credit providers in recent months.
In response to this challenge, we have three main priority areas:
- Expanding provision of affordable credit through a scaled community finance sector
- Partnering with banks and financial services providers to support the delivery of products and services for customers in vulnerable circumstances
- New product and market development – developing and scaling products and services to address market gaps
You can find our full strategy here.
About Salad
As a for-profit social enterprise and the first truly responsible workforce lender, we’re proud to be different.
This runs right to the heart of how we operate as a business. Unlike most workforce lenders our social objectives come top of the list. Fairness, equality and providing affordable credit for NHS and public sector workers outweighs our need to make a profit every time.