Sunny. A short term loan that helps customers rather than putting them in more debt.
It was a pretty genius idea.
The big problem that customers had with other loans was what we called the cycle of debt. Once a customer took out their first loan, they had to pay so much back that it put them in more debt, so they took out another loan to pay for that and another loan to pay for that. And that was working for the other companies out there because it meant they had a constant stream of income, although there was no loyalty because these customers would shop around for the lowest (always around 3000% to 4000% interest). But this was shortly after the economy crash so customers were totally disenfranchised with the industry and wanted a better option.
Sunny rewarded customers for making payments on time by lowering their interest, so they could pay back what they needed to faster. The more loans you take out with them, as long as you continue to pay back on time, the lower the rate goes. So it would actually help you to stick with Sunny.
The plan eventually was to bring all of these customers back into good credit so they wouldn’t need us anymore.
In the UK the market leader by a massive stretch is a company called Wonga.
They’re classic payday loans, nothing positive about them. They loan you a little bit of cash and they take back a hell of a lot more. They were really screwing all of their customers over but they had a great marketing campaign using old people puppets that the public loved.
So our campaign was basically saying “don’t trust puppets, they screw you over.”
