This is a guest post by Kevin Allen, CRO at The Money Platform

It’s important to work for a company that you respect and provides a product good for its customers. It’s classic dinner table question, “what do you do for a living”.  Mostly I’ve always worked for large blue chip companies including Standard Chartered Bank, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Centrica, FICO, MasterCard and Lloyds Banking Group. So although I wasn’t going to set any dinner party conversations alight, I didn’t have to admit I worked as an estate agent, politician or worse. Then I worked with RateSetter and I became actually proud of my employment, what’s not to like about working for an internet start-up in something funky called “peer-to-peer”. I was helping to provide a better product to a new type of investor called a “lender” in a new asset class that was providing fair and consistent returns. We were bringing a new lexicon to banking and innovations such as the Provision Fund. Borrowers also got a better deal from a company with excellent customer service, not disdain. I wasn’t a banker anymore, I was working in the “sharing economy”, a financial hipster….

However I’ve been lucky to have these employment choices. I’ve been the first cynic to sit on his pedestal and mock those that worked for less altruistic companies. And when I met people working for high-cost short-term lenders, I never let them forget it. I wasn’t a supporter of the football clubs that took their money to advertise a terrible product on their shirts. This is especially personal as I have a family interest, someone that isn’t so financially literate (and to be blunt, who was in dire straits) that borrowed 300 GBP, and ended up having to pay back 1,200 GBP within nine months. As far as I was concerned the sub-prime pay-day loan industry had a poor reputation for a reason, some lenders were exploitative. I mean, can anyone really defend 5,000% APRs? So why have I agreed to work for a short term lender, The Money Platform. A few of my friends are already looking down on me from that moral pedestal that I previously sat upon. Continue reading →