Phase 1: Shaking up the borrower offering

In a nutshell, we want to develop lending products that work better for home owners. Our aim is to be the lender of choice for home owners and drive more volume for our investor members and retain borrowers for longer periods of time in our platform and give our borrowers more choice.

To do this, we’re building and implementing new product offerings onto the borrower side. This will mean four loan types with a slightly different fee and product structure for each going forward.

These products will be:

• Personal loan (for things like holidays, weddings, education a new computer etc.)
• Car loan (this will also include trailers, floats, caravans and tiny houses) 
• Debt consolidation loan
• Home equity loan (for borrowing for things for the house, like a new kitchen, bathroom, insulation or solar panels)

Some of the borrower fee and product structure changes within these include a 1-year interest only period, expanding the maximum term to seven years and making some products fee-free.

We’re in building phase as we speak, so watch this space.

Changes coming on the investor side

Once the borrower side has been taken care of, we’ll then get onto building and implementing changes on the investor side. What this will mean for our investor members is a more liquid investment option over a 1-year term, hopefully a lot higher volume of borrowers coming through and of course, an even better quality of borrower, with the bulk of them being home owners.

Another change we’ll be making, and one we have a feeling will be a very welcome change, will be creating more flexibility in the Secondary Market. This should help take away some of the burden of having to decide an order size to begin with.

Our proposed changes are:  

• Investments will be able to have portions split-off so that your investments can be partially sold; and
• Investments on the secondary market will be able to be taken up by multiple orders, so they no longer need to be transferred one a 1:1 basis which should make selling a large investment easier.

Exciting times! Watch this space for further updates.

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The opinions expressed in this article should not be taken as financial advice, or a recommendation of any financial product. Squirrel shall not be liable or responsible for any information, omissions, or errors present. Any commentary provided are the personal views of the author and are not necessarily representative of the views and opinions of Squirrel. We recommend seeking professional investment and/or mortgage advice before taking any action.

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