In our 21st century of ever-advancing technological innovation, the advent of the pingtree will have gone largely unnoticed. Certainly by the vast majority of the general public.
Unless they happen to work in finance in general and loans in particular there’s no real need or reason to have heard of them. Here at Badger Loans we’d never heard of them either until we came to work in the consumer credit industry.
What’s a Pingtree Grandad?
So what actually is a pingtree? It’s a piece of software which contains every lender on a broker’s panel. It has all their lending criteria and a whole host of complex algorithms. These are used to decide which lender gets which customer.
Pingtrees have a reputation in some quarters for ‘targeting the most vulnerable’. They also allegedly pay the highest commissions first before any other criteria’. Plain wrong.
Even if we wanted to put the highest commission payers at the top of the tree so they get first dibs, we couldn’t. There’s something called ‘treating your customers fairly’ . This originally devised by the previous regulator the FSA. It has been taken up by the current version, the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). It is designed to counteract this very type of approach.
Rightly so and in practice it means that the algorithms sort through a combination of the lowest interest rates first. Then it’s the likelihood to lend and then commissions payable. It does this before deciding who to show your application to first. It’s basically out of our hands.
How does a Pingtree work?
The pingtree makes use of existing technology to give you the customer the ability to put yourself in front of every lender on our panel of lenders. These include most of the High Street lenders on page 1 of Google and then some besides. And it can do this without affecting your credit file. That’s what’s called a ‘soft search’ because it leaves no trace.
Each lender can assess your credit worthiness (in their opinion). They can then decide whether they want to take this a step further. That stage then becomes the pre-lending phase where possibly proof of income and a phone call to check identity. Identity documents will need producing until finally a decision is reached and you get the money in your bank account.
This whole process which used to take anything up to 2 weeks now happens in the blink of an eye. A long blink of an eye as it normally takes a day. It can be done in an hour but that’s rare even with the tech we now have at our disposal.
Credit Broking in the 21st Century
It turned out we don’t need to know any of the products our panel of lenders are supplying. That’s because we aren’t going to be speaking or writing to anyone to give them any advice. Even though we are licensed to do so and have had to go through and pay for the whole licensing process with the FCA.
Nor do we need to know anyone in the lending industry outside of the people who own and administer the pingtree because the pingtree knows everyone and the pingtree knows every product from every lender.
The result of the above advances in technology meant that our day to day focus is in trying to get the site as high up the rankings as possible for as many relevant keywords as could be imagined. It means we could leave product knowledge and industry insider knowledge to an algorithm which is updated daily and which knows the business inside out.
Computer says ‘no!’
So that should be it, the customer gets their short term loan at the best rate from the most relevant lender and providing we’ve got Badger Loans to page 1 of a major search engine for a keyword that produces lots of hits we get lots of customers. Yes and no. Nothing is perfect, algorithms are input by humans, mistakes get made and pork pies get told on both sides of the fence but it’s the best system we’ve got right now and it makes best use of the available technology.
We’re not great fans of the pingtree process because it has removed the human element from small loans and short term lending. There is literally nobody we could ring to discuss your case with and thereby get you the money. It really is an unfortunate case of ‘computer says no’ or hopefully ‘yes’ but it has its good points too. All the lenders with all their criteria in one algorithm. When it works it works well and for now it’s the only game in town.
Good luck with your hunt for the right loan for you.
