TrustTwo is a new guarantor loan product from the team at Everyday Loans (owned by Secure Trust Bank Plc). It has replaced Duo that was packaged alongside the main product. This new brand is served on its own website at www.trusttwo.co.uk that was put together towards the end of 2014. The TrustTwo guarantor loans have 2 standout qualities that includes low pricing and the high available loan sums. They have replaced Duo in providing the cheapest sector rate at 39.9% APR. With sums, £7500 can be obtained although this is by applicants that can source a homeowner backing. Otherwise, with tenant backings you can access between £1000 and £5000.

The term range sits between 13 and 60 months, but you can settle early. The signup process is completed online and so you won’t have to send out documents to them. It is headlined that the payout should take around 3 working days. Users can take advantage of the login added at www.trusttwo.co.uk. Low cost is the key USP of this service. The minimum term is 13 months, but if you cleared after 12 on £1000 then you would pay just £195.88. Most similar firms charge around £230 to £240. Their customer support advisors are available from Monday to Friday (9am to 6pm) and on Saturdays (9am to 12pm).

Searching for a guarantor shouldn’t be difficult since they accept tenants. There is quite a high age requirement asked for though between 25 and 74 years old. It has been good to see this new company launch on its own domain. The navigation on their older site for Duo was always tricky. Other than offering the higher £7500 there has been no other major product update. You can now receive up to £12,500 at Everyday, but the process on that side still needs to be completed at a store and payout is by cheque. Fortunately, this hassle-free solution enables funding within just a few days without any such required visit.

Different Money is the new name that has replaced MyMate. This rebrand took place in 2014 with MyMate itself only being launched in 2013 and so it was a surprise to see a change like this occur. I did think that they carried out a great job on the branding of the original company, but the newer offering is also catchy. The new product available at www.differentmoney.co.uk spans between 2 and 12 months. New and returning customers have instant access to the same available cash sums that starts at £150 and stretches as high as £2500. Different Money loans do however come with restrictions based on the amounts selected.

To provide an example, if £300 was selected then the limit would be 4 months and if £1000 was chosen then the repayment limit would stand at 9. As was the case with MyMate, the standard of www.differentmoney.co.uk has been crafted to a high standard with secure logins being equipped here. With pricing, for £300 over 3 months the cost would be £156.51. Over a year £1000 can’t be selected, but £2000 would cost £1849.84 (this would split as £924.92). Payouts are processed between Monday and Friday (8am to 8pm) and on Saturdays (9am to 1pm). There has been a change here since the previous Saturday time was 10am to 6pm.

The cost that we sampled above at £156.51 is an improvement compared to their past price at £172.41. If you may recall, there was a supporting guarantor option handed to those that failed their credit check. This option appears to have now been discontinued since it is no longer mentioned. The potential sum of £2500 has remained in place that I’m sure will help to attract new customers in. There is plenty of flexibility on offer and early settlements can be made. Whether this brand can emerge will have a lot to do with advertising where they will have to challenge big spending instalment lenders like Lending Stream and Satsuma Loans.

Savvy is a 2014 rebrand of Lightning Loans that itself previously went under the guise of Valour Loans. The background of the original brand is unknown, but the owner has been trading since 2003. This is the second company that has changed their identity in 2014 (with the other being Different Money that was a change from MyMate). This new service in focus at www.savvy.co.uk is specialised in loans over the period of 12 months. If an applicant successfully passes their credit check, but is counted as a risk then they will be offered a smaller 6 month term on more restricted cash sums of £100 to £300.

The 12 month term grants sums between £300 and £2000. The pricing when you take out £1000 will be £1000 and so there is a simple 100% charge. We did spot a note that there may be a small fee imposed for same day funding. This wouldn’t be expected to be any higher than £6 or so. This is now the central lending arm of Valour Finance Group Ltd whilst they broker through Best4Loans. The owner has poured plenty of cash into this rebrand that is evident from the high standard that www.savvy.co.uk has been crafted to. Secure logins are provided here to those who take out a loan.

The Savvy loans can only be accessed between Monday and Friday. They make no reference to the times and so standard working hours would likely be when the payouts are arranged. There has been a number of product changes from the older Lightning identity. They for instance previously offered a monthly repayment between £80 and £800. The previous charge over the year was also £1199.96 and so they have lowered this. Whilst it is always good to see reductions being made, you would have expected them to cut this cost down further to be more competitive against lenders like Pounds to Pocket. They charge £875.61 per year (with Promo) and they trade 24/7.

Both the Peachy and Wonga promo code have been discontinued in the 2015 year that will be covered in further detail here. Whilst these codes are no longer available you can receive a better deal with each of these lenders today than you could ever receive when such discounts could be obtained. These coupons were designed to take out their fast transmission fees for same day funding. Peachy charged £5 for this and Wonga asked for £5.50. Cash On Go’s Peachy loans promo was granted to new and returning customers that helped to differentiate it. Once used the customer would pay 1% daily (you’d pay £10 if you borrowed for 10 days).

The Wonga promo code was however available to new applicants only. When this coupon was applied it also took the overall charge down to 1% and so the same short term price was available here. The past savings got the price down to 1% with each lender, but now that the FCA cap has come into force the maximum rate that can be charged is 0.8% per day and so as you can see a better deal can be had by all customers. One significant change since the cap has seen Cash On Go adapt their product into instalments. The minimum repayment that can be selected now sits at 15 days, but they now head up to 12 months.

The market leading short term lender on the other hand still allows customers to choose any single day within the month, with one slight change being that the minimum loan is now £50 rather than £1. Once you do surpass £50 though the sums move up in £1 increments. Some good news on the promotional code front is that QuickQuid are still offering savings in 2015. They provide their speedy transfer for free and so the coupon is being reduced against their interest. There are no other known available codes across the short term sector. If you are happy to borrow over instalment periods then Pounds to Pocket still grant savings.

It has been a good while now since we have introduced any loan brokers on the site. Today we will be profiling Sandhurst Associates Ltd and their two most popular brands that have become very popular in a short space of time (although this growth is aligned with aggressive SMS marketing). Sandhurst Associates is based in the Blackpool region and they have launched a vast collection of trading brands. We chose to highlight their most popular release named JustLendCash and Lightning Dosh that is also well known joins them. A few other firms on their network that have enjoyed swift sector growth have included 247 Funds, BrillBorrow, InYourSkyRocket and LootKwik.

JustLendCash that trades from www.justlendcash.co.uk was launched in 2013. This website is designed primarily with the lead capture in mind, but they do encrypt. They list a vast sum range between £100 and £50,000 with terms as high as 25 years. Sums this high are usually printed to aid conversion rates. You would expect them to be hooked up with several payday lenders. There is no cost breakdown, but just a simple headed 527% APR. Lightning Dosh at www.lightningdosh.co.uk is built in a similar way, but the web design is improved. The amount span is smaller between £100 and £2000 and the displayed rate is higher.

Across both noted sites there is a reference that they hold CCTA membership. We can’t validate this, but we did check and they do hold a licence (#641617) and their FCA profile does show all of their approved trading names. Both JustLendCash and Lightning Dosh attach unsubscribe buttons. On a related note, most people will have become introduced to this pair through receiving text messages. Details will have been passed over when they had applied with a lender and been turned down. It may be the case that Sandhurst is attached to a range of firms, but we know for sure that they do use the Cardiff-based lender (Tide U Over).

The QuickQuid promo code 2015 is a significant coupon that when used creates the UK’s cheapest monthly payday loan. Since the FCA was enforced at the start of this year pretty much every lender has set their price to meet the cap at 0.8% daily. As a result, you now pay £24 per £100 over 30 days. The codes from Peachy and Wonga that discounted their transfer fees have now been removed since they themselves have to offer free transmissions since they can only charge 0.8% max per day. The QuickQuid promo code is now the only active discount available in the monthly sector (Pounds to Pocket still offer instalment savings).

The QQ 2014 saving came in at 30%, whilst the new saving is 25%. This fresh discount is cutting against £24 though and so the new charge to pay is just £18 per £100. Before the cap they charged variable interest at either £20, £25 or £29.50 and so you could previously get this down to £14, £17.50 or £20.65 (most applicants paid the bottom tier charge). At the start of the year when viewing their site they had created a dedicated page promoting a 5% saving (QQ5: £24 – £1.20 = £22.80). However, over the past few months they have been promoting the improved rate through their advertising campaigns online.

This new deal calculates as (QQ25: £24 – £6 = £18). As has always been the case, this is a new customer only deal. This does seem strange since you would expect them to try and keep their users loyal especially since the competition has ramped up so significantly in recent years. This new QuickQuid promo code 2015 can also be used over their extended terms (2 or 3 months). They don’t quite compare so well for pricing over these extended terms though. Their FlexCredit service has now been closed down and so if you are looking for a more manageable term then you can go with their sister-brand Pounds to Pocket who we mentioned above.

Code to Enter at www.quickquid.co.uk: QQ25.

We Recently Explained why the site hadn’t been updated for some time and we expressed the desire to get things back on track. There is a lot to discuss when it comes to casualties from the FCA ruling, but for today we will just pick up on the major payday lender closures that we know as it stands. An entire fleet of firms have now closed down, however it is the bigger companies of interest since many of their exits came as a surprise. The most well known exit (certainly when factoring popularity though Google) would be Microcredit Ltd’s MiniCredit brand. They cancelled their licence and ceased trading as of the 10th December.

MiniCredit had been active since 2008 and they had put together a quality loan product, that was only let down by an excessive transmission fee of £19.50. They did offer promo codes, but this reduced their interest and not their payout fee. Even before they had closed, there was a few issues creeping up. Rather than the flexible term span of 1 to 42 days, they had updated to force a monthly repayment. They did also previously trade 7/7 days, but later changed to close on Sundays. Their announcement came before the cap came in, but this would have been the central reason why they were unable to continue trading online.

The next major closure is Cash Genie that was always one of the UK’s most memorable online lending brands. They were known to be one of the most profitable payday lenders and an acquisition by EZCorp Inc showed the intent that they could go on to challenge the industry frontrunners. Shortly before closure, they removed the requirement of a fast funding fee, but obviously they just couldn’t cut back on interest to meet the required 0.8% daily limit. Both Cash Genie and MiniCredit could be considered as the major payday loan closures. There were however other well known companies that took the decision to bow out such as Vivus.

The Vivus owner (4Finance Group) trades in a dozen countries across Europe. They arrived locally back in 2012 when they pitched a free payday loan for all new customers. There was lots of potential with this lender, but they could never bring much of a challenge to lenders like Wonga, who they are interestingly battling out for dominance with over in the emerging Polish Sector. Another international player no longer active is Speedy Cash who have 23 high street stores. These outlets will remain open, but they have now stopped lending online to UK residents. You can still in essence use them through WageDayAdvance that is now owned by them.

The Cheque Centre has also stopped trading on the web although this was a while back and QuickQuid FlexCredit has now gone. Seeing FlexCredit close wasn’t too much of a surprise since their owner has Pounds to Pocket filling the same type of role for them in the instalment sector. Some other notable firms that have closed includes the likes of Full Pocket and Liquid Advance. There are many more known, but it will take time to gather data on everyone that we have introduced on the site. Many firms have remained active, but they have completely changed their repayment structures. The biggest change for the better has certainly been seen with MyJar.

They auto-approve new cash requests and so can be used at any time that any funds are required by their users. The problem over their history has been that they only offered a single fixed repayment. However, you can now choose any term of choice between 1 and 90 days (paying 0.8% daily). Peachy and Sunny who have been advertising extensively in recent years have also made significant changes to their products and Swift Sterling has now moved from monthly to instalments. The idea will be to cover every known closure and change once we have given it some time for the dust to settle with the new regulations.

Miyagi Loans has not received fresh content or any updates for some time now that will be explained here. There is one major reason for this and a few other issues that haven’t helped the situation. Going right back to the beginning, no visitors arrived across the initial month. Then out of nowhere the hits started increasing very quickly and between this period and 6 months the traffic continued to grow until it peaked. We had hit first page rankings for many of the major lenders that were introduced and some of these are searched thousands of times each day via Google. We also received lots of brand-related searches from return users.

For the next few months the traffic started to decline and we were unable to get it back despite continuing to scale up the project. Before 12 months was reached there was a Google update that to be honest smashed the traffic to pieces. Between then and now (14ish months) the page views stand at around 20% of our best day (100%). There is always going to be a steady stream of traffic coming through since there is a lot of long tails generated from 370ish blog posts. There are still some page one rankings for lesser well known companies, but for the majors we have lost that punch that we once had.

Many of our main competitors that ranked well back then have also fallen and so it is clear that Google went to town with that update. What you will tend to find these days is that the top positions are filled with either absolute tripe or super authority pages (news articles, Wikipedia etc). Domain age appears more important than ever. The reason behind the site dropping is not clear. When you scale a lot of posts about similar companies (as we did with car finance firms) I guess their spiders can see this as filler content that may have not helped. Just before the drop the meta description tags were changed for every page.

This again may have caused problems. We did also often have competitors copying our content and dropping dodgy links. Unfortunately, these are the kind of “Winners” you have battling out in the search engines these days. Some changes were later made on the layout, but otherwise the site has just been gathering dust. This was done in case the meta issue was just a temporary drop. In the meantime I have been working on a few new projects. One of these is a similar type of website to Miyagi Loans that I think has a lot of potential. This only recently passed the 6 week stage though and so we will have to wait and see on that.

In the initial passage, I did note that there was another big problem springing up. This was the FCA cap that arrived on January 2nd. Through this new regulation, lenders can only charge 0.8% per day (£24 per £100 over 30 days). When this went though an incredibly large number of payday lenders closed down (much more than was originally predicted). As well as this, many big name firms have shifted from monthly to instalment. As a result of the closures and changes, there must be around 150ish posts here that need to be updated. I always believe that a website demands progress or you should just forget about it.

Based on the required changes, the love/hate relationship with Google and the other projects I did consider moving on. As well as this, I have a major housing problem at the moment that isn’t good. Anyway, I have made the decision to just get this post out there and then maybe make a few updates on the design. Giving it a bit of a nudge is definitely worth trying and then I can hopefully start to fix up the outdated content. Much depends really on whether I see a spark of progress. If you have any suggestions or questions then feel free to shoot a message over through the form.

Whilst Evans Halshaw is one of the most well known dealership chains found in the UK, I’m sure that their owner (Pendragon Plc) will be just as proud of Stratstone that is the luxury arm of the group. They acquired the brand back in the year 1992. The company itself was established in 1921 and they are found on the web at www.stratstone.com. They are well known for their Aston Martin, Jaguar and Porsche outlets. They also have a Ferrari showroom and a range of further franchises built for the likes of BMW, Land Rover and Mercedes Benz. They have in the region of 85 showrooms in total.

They generate operating profits on a similar level to their larger sister-brand Evans Halshaw, but this is perhaps understandable since they are selling premium cars. There is a Stratstone finance options page, but this generally just informs you of the various financing options across the market. There is no data surrounding the lending panel that they have teamed up with. When browsing across their vehicle search most of the agreements were headed as HP (Hire Purchase) that sets terms between 12 and 60 months. We picked out a price for one of their Jaguar X-Type models. The value of this was £10,226 and a 48 month repayment was selected.

The total charge for this example was £3561.12 that had a headed APR of 14.1%. You can’t apply for credit through www.stratstone.com, but you can fill in a form so that they can get back to you by phone. All of the showrooms that we checked were open on each day of the week, but the specific times varied across those that we checked. This luxury automotive dealer has come a long way over the years, but they do certainly have fierce competition across the market. Both Charles Hurst and JCT600 for instance each have Ferrari showrooms, as well as other flagship manufacturers across their networks.

The Quicks brand found at www.quicks.co.uk is one of the newer used car supermarket chains around that launched in 2010. They have been growing quickly though that has a lot to do with them being part of Pendragon Plc who are mostly known through their control of Evans Halshaw and Stratstone. There are 6 dealerships listed that includes locations in Hull, Lincoln, Stockton, Stoke, Sunderland and York. However, on the main corporate site it states that they have 7 outlets. The number of used cars for sale stands at just below 1000. They sell a selection of models from the likes of Ford, Mercedes, Mini and Vauxhall.

We were interested in uncovering the Quicks finance details. Financing is available, although they don’t present info on such basics as the lenders that they use. When you search through their listings they do provide breakdown credit charges though. They offer the terms of 12 to 60 months and so it would be a HP agreement offered. We picked out a motor listed at £10,000.01 and selected a repayment period of 48 months. The charge came in at £2805.84 and there was a headlined APR of 11.44%. You can’t apply through www.quicks.co.uk and will be asked to fill in a simple enquiry form.

When browsing the site it was functioning very slowly, but this may have been a temporary server issue. All of the dealerships are open 7/7 days. The Monday to Friday times are 10am to 7pm, Saturday is 9am to 7pm and Sunday is 10.30am to 5pm. On purchases, a small warranty is passed on each sale at 30 days alongside a Money Back Guarantee for the first 7 days. Their sister-brands (Evans Halshaw and Stratstone) each currently boast an operating profit of around £27 million, whilst this company is currently operating at a loss and so there is certainly still a lot of groundwork to be laid here.