Responsible Lending

Smart-Pig is a responsible lender because:

• We make sure you don’t borrow too frequently. Smart-pig short term student loans aren’t meant for borrowing long term. If we notice you are using Smart-Pig too much, and your short-term loan is turning into a long-term loan, then we’ll get in touch and conduct extra checks on you. In some cases, we might even agree to gradually lower the limit you can borrow to help you use the product less.

• We make sure your loan is affordable. We check every applicant’s income and expenditure and then double-check it using typical values to make sure that your Smart-Pig loan is affordable for you based on your circumstances.

• We work with you when things don’t go to plan. When things don’t go to plan and you can’t repay your smart-pig student loan as originally promised, then no late payment fees, a grace period and a lower interest cap all help protect you. These only solve half the problem though –our UK based team are here to help and will work with you to arrange an alternative, affordable way to repay depending on your circumstances. It’s important that you make the effort to work with us too –the more you tell us and the better able you are to keep promises, the sooner we will be able to get you back on track.

We do checks on every Smart-Pig loan to make sure they are affordable for you. This is called loan affordability and is done in addition to checks on your credit file and your history of repaying other forms of credit such as personal loans and credit cards.

This means that you can afford to repay the loan, as well as all your regular costs and other creditors, leave some money left over for safety.

During the application we ask you for your student finance income and any other income you may receive from employment, which we check. We also ask you to tell us about your costs, and we check this against information we get from your credit file, public databases, and sometimes your bank statements.

Smart-Pig loans cost 0.8% per day, capped at 50% per loan. To borrow £100, a loan costs 80p per day until the total interest reaches £50. After that, no more interest or fees will be applied, even If things don’t go to plan. The annual interest rate, ignoring our interest cap, is 292%.

Another way of looking at it is our loans for students cost from £2.00 to £5.60 per week per £100 borrowed. To borrow £100:

• A one-week loan repaying £105.60 in total costs £5.60 per week
• A 25-week loan repaying £150 in total costs £2.00 per week. The average cost per week is lower due to the interest cap.

Representative Example: £200 loan for 30 days. Interest 292% p.a. fixed. Total to repay £248.00. Representative 1270% APR

Smart-Pig is a trading name of FCL Consumer Finance Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Smart-Pig loans were the first short loan product to be authorised by the FCA in 2015 – read Our Story to find out more.

The FCA is a principles-based regulator, meaning that as well as specific rules to follow, Smart-Pig loans has to adopt these principles as a business and use them when conducting ourselves and making decisions.

Smart-Pig is a member of the Consumer Finance Association (CFA) through our parent company SBTP Group.