Fair for You improves people’s lives through responsible lending, helping families access the things they need and supporting them along the way. They believe that affordable finance should be accessible to a wider range of people including many of the 17.5 million people excluded from mainstream finance due to low or fluctuating income or life events.
Challenge
Fair for You (CV5 9RG) works across the country and was established in 2015 to provide an alternative to high-cost lenders. Owned by a charity whose mission is to alleviate poverty, Fair for You focuses on helping people buy household essentials like fridges, ovens and beds by providing affordable and flexible credit.
They help people avoid high-cost credit and loan sharks that prey on financially vulnerable individuals and families. They understand that circumstances change, big life events happen and that your credit score often doesn’t tell the full story about your current financial circumstances.
Solution
As a responsible lender, Fair for You carries out its own affordability checks to decide if applicants are eligible for responsible credit.
They also use other tools like Open Banking to better understand people’s ability to repay a loan – helping where possible and signposting to other sources of support when they are not able to help.
They have partnerships with retailers including Whirlpool, Dunelm and Argos, which give customers a range of options to furnish or replace items in the home. Fair for You’s latest innovation is a microcredit scheme to help families stock up on a big grocery shop at Iceland stores during school holiday periods. Customers receive a preloaded card that can be spent online and in-store allowing them to spread the costs of household groceries when there are more hungry mouths to feed.
Revenue
Fair for You’s interest rates are typically the best available to their target customers who are excluded from mainstream finance. All proceeds are recycled to keep costs as low as possible for customers and to ensure that Fair for You continues to operate sustainably.
Impact
The social investment enabled Fair for You to trial certain elements of their products in Wales, providing a proof of concept and the ability to extend these services across the UK. The capital was also used to create clear, easy-to-understand videos to help communicate what they do and how it works. This has, in part, helped to prevent people from approaching unfair, pay day lenders and community loan sharks, providing an alternative method of finance for those that need it most.
In its first five years, an independent social impact report showed that Fair for You had generated £50.5 million of social value for more than 33,500 customers, including helping 71% of them to move away from high-cost credit.
“For Key Fund, this was a fantastic way to support families who would otherwise be unable to access credit – and we saw lots of synergy with our own mission here at Key Fund in financing organisations unable to access mainstream finance. Fair For You have a strong ethos about doing all the right checks on affordability and ensuring that borrowers won’t end up experiencing financial insecurity as a result of these loans. They provide an essential service in the current climate, helping people who need it most and we’re proud to play a role in supporting this mission.”
Chris Colwell, Investment Manager at Key Fund
"Everything we do at Fair for You is about making life easier for hard pressed households. The Key Fund has enabled us to pilot and develop new innovative lending solutions that allow for sustainable lending at very low values, steering thousands more families away from high-cost and illegal lenders. These learnings have been pivotal in informing the future of our lending products and advancing our social impact.”
Chris Bennett, Head of Commercial and Partnerships at Fair for You