Hi all,
My name is Ellen and I work in the Lending team. Thanks to everyone who took the time to share feedback on this - we’re really grateful for your thoughts and we’re taking it on board. Just to let you know: we’ve removed this prompt and ended this experiment.
We love it when you tell us what we’re getting right, but we also need to listen when we get things wrong. We’re sorry if this test came across as irresponsible - this was not what we intended. Here’s a bit more context behind our thinking…
We ran a small experiment with around 600 customers earlier today, offering them loans above their Pots. We chose these customers because their Pots had an active goal and were titled ‘Holiday’, ‘Travel’ or other place names. The thinking there was to allow people to lock in lower flight and hotel prices (as they tend to get higher the closer to the trip that you book), and give a structured and fair way to pay them back. We considered a couple of different use cases and we ultimately chose travel, as it’s something many people might use credit or a credit card for, and it’s time-sensitive.
We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone, and as a few of you have said, loans like this can be legitimately useful. Lending is a part of our strategy for becoming a sustainable business, but we wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t meet your needs. It’s important to us to lend responsibly.
People use Pots in a lot of different ways. Even though we tried hard to target this appropriately, sometimes when you’ve created a Pot with a specific goal, you’ve already made a decision about whether to borrow or not. As a few people mentioned – having goal dates on Pots would have helped to make the targeting more relevant and avoid confusion. It’s now something we’re considering.
As ever, we really appreciate you taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We’ll keep thinking and experimenting to find out how we can make loans work for the people that need them.