In just nine months, Massy Fi­nance’s on­line lend­ing plat­form, In­staLoan, has crossed the $50 mil­lion mark, said its man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Du­ane Hink­son, in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

“We launched in the mid­dle of Ju­ly last year so we are clos­ing in on a year. We are in the mid­dle of April now so nine months and In­staLoan has been a fan­tas­tic suc­cess sto­ry and not just for Massy Fi­nance but for the mar­ket, Hink­son said.

Hink­son said the up­take for loans had been “a lot stronger than an­tic­i­pat­ed.”

“We are well ahead of where we ex­pect­ed to be af­ter this amount of time. And there has been no diminu­tion in the de­mand for In­staLoans,” he said.

Massy Fi­nance part­nered with Car­ilend, a fi­nan­cial-tech­nol­o­gy firm out of Bar­ba­dos, to of­fer 100 per cent web-based per­son­al loans of up to $50,000 on the lo­cal mar­ket.

Car­ilend start­ed in Bar­ba­dos and then they went to Ja­maica be­fore com­ing to T&T, Hink­son said.

“And in fact, the Bar­ba­dos mod­el is dif­fer­ent to here be­cause Bar­ba­dos is a peer-to-peer lend­ing mod­el, where­as in T&T Car­ilend and Massy have part­nered to­geth­er and so we are joint­ly do­ing In­staLoan and the fund­ing for In­staLoan is through Massy,” Hink­son said.

“In Bar­ba­dos it is in­di­vid­u­als who put up mon­ey and then that is what gets lent out,” he said.

In Ja­maica, Car­ilend has part­nered with Vic­to­ria Mu­tu­al, a large fi­nan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny.

“In all the ter­ri­to­ries that they have gone in­to the re­sponse has been very, very good,” Hink­son said.

Hink­son said the de­mand for the loans has not dwin­dled.

“In­ter­est­ing­ly, the de­mand has con­tin­ued to be very strong. We an­tic­i­pat­ed con­tin­ued growth in de­mand so while the over­all port­fo­lio is go­ing to keep grow­ing we ex­pect it to keep grow­ing at a faster rate at least for the next year,” Hink­son said.

Hink­son said ac­cord­ing to da­ta “apart from (de­mand) just grow­ing it is not nec­es­sar­i­ly lin­ear it has been some­what ex­po­nen­tial.”

In­staLoans start at $5,000 and go up to $50,000, with re­pay­ment terms from one to five years.

Its in­ter­est rate starts at ten per cent, but they ex­pect it to nor­malise at 15 per cent.

In­s­ta­Loans are un­se­cured.

“As in any fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, port­fo­lio delin­quen­cy is a ma­jor item that is mon­i­tored and mea­sured,” Hink­son said.

“That is one of the things that at­tract­ed us to it. It was the fact that in both coun­tries where they had op­er­at­ed, Bar­ba­dos ini­tial­ly, where it has been for over five years, and then Ja­maica, both port­fo­lios, al­though in dif­fer­ent mar­kets, we have seen have had very low delin­quen­cy. Bar­ba­dos un­der three per cent, T&T just around three per cent, and Ja­maica some­where in that range as well,” he said.

“The bot­tom line is for this type of lend­ing prod­uct and un­se­cured in the way it does, that kind of delin­quen­cy is fan­tas­tic. It is good and it is a tes­ta­ment to how we have set up the cred­it scor­ing and the busi­ness rules around ad­ju­di­ca­tion of per­sons for el­i­gi­bil­i­ty or non el­i­gi­bil­i­ty,” Hink­son said.

The en­tire ap­pli­ca­tion process is done on­line.

“This is go­ing to re­main an on­line, ful­ly au­to­mat­ed un­se­cured lend­ing chan­nel and I don’t an­tic­i­pate that chang­ing any time soon. That is the mod­el they have fol­lowed that they are very good at, the tech­nol­o­gy plat­form that’s in place and the way the risk mit­i­ga­tion around that works, has worked very very well, with very low delin­quen­cy and so we don’t re­al­ly want to rock that boat,” Hink­son said.

“I think we are com­fort­able with how it has been op­er­at­ing and how we ex­pect it to op­er­ate so I think we are just go­ing to kind of stay the course, just stay in that kind of core mar­ket, and that kind of core frame of op­er­a­tion and just let it grow from there. Any­thing else that we want to do we will prob­a­bly do in-house here at Massy Fi­nance,” he said.

So to what does Hink­son at­tribute In­staLoan’s suc­cess?

“One would have been the fact of height­ened de­mand from peo­ple com­ing out of the pan­dem­ic be­cause peo­ple would have need­ed some ad­di­tion­al liq­uid­i­ty sup­port,” Hink­son said.

Apart from that, Hink­son said be­cause of the loss of in­come dur­ing the pan­dem­ic sev­er­al peo­ple would have found their en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it to sur­vive.

Hink­son said In­staLoan has helped peo­ple mak­ing those en­tre­pre­neur­ial dreams come true.

“Part of it is al­so be­cause we be­lieve that our of­fer­ing, both in the way that we do it and in the risk re­turn met­rics, of­fer a bet­ter al­ter­na­tive to some of the oth­er un­se­cured lend­ing chan­nels that they have out there,” Hink­son said.

“We be­lieve that our pric­ing is quite good in this space and as a re­sult of that we have got peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in com­ing across to us, even though they might have ex­po­sure with some of the oth­ers, we have been able to cap­ture some of that share as well,” he said.

The ease in the ap­proval process he be­lieves has al­so at­tract­ed cus­tomers.

“Every­thing is done on­line, a full ap­pli­ca­tion is done on­line and with­in 24 hours you get a de­ci­sion,” Hink­son said.

“De­spite the ease of get­ting it done, there are tra­di­tion­al bank­ing process­es tak­ing place in the back­ground so funds are very well pro­tect­ed, and very well mit­i­gat­ed,” he said.

“And that is why we have been able to grow the books so phe­nom­e­nal­ly and keep delin­quen­cies so low,” he said.