Beforepay acquires 1 million registered users and surpasses $1 billion in total advances
Beforepay Group Limited (“Beforepay”) (ASX:B4P), the ethical-lending fintech, has acquired 1 million registered users and surpassed $1 billion in pay advances. News of the company’s growth milestone comes just weeks after Beforepay was named 2023 Ethical Lender of the Year in the global Pan Finance Awards.
Supporting working Australians
Beforepay is a mission-driven organisation that was established to disrupt predatory lending and provide working Australians with a safe and affordable way to navigate temporary cash-flow challenges.
Beforepay allows eligible customers to access advances of up to $2000 for a 5% fixed transaction fee, with no interest or late fees.
Customers can only take one advance at a time, with each advance needing to be fully repaid before a customer is eligible for a second one, ensuring that users do not fall into a debt spiral.
Because Beforepay doesn’t charge compound interest or late fees, its only incentive is for the customer to repay the advance in a timely fashion. Credit-card or personal loan providers, by contrast, are motivated to keep customers in debt for as long as possible.
Effective risk management is at the heart of the product, with machine-learning models trained on more than one billion data points used to make decisions on advances and to set limits, calculating hundreds of different attributes for each customer. In order to keep advances affordable, with the average cost to the customer less than $20 per advance, Beforepay is also focused on efficiency, issuing almost 40,000 advances each week with only a few dozen staff.
Mission-driven growth
Beforepay and its flagship wage-advance product have grown rapidly since commercial launch in 1 August 2020.
Just last year, in August 2022, Beforepay announced the company had issued more than $500 million in pay advances. This figure has doubled in less than 12 months, as the need for accessible financial products continues to expand.
The increase in the company’s user base during this time has also been significant, with Beforepay’s registered users growing from 750,000 in August 2022 to more than 1 million in June.
“We’re proud to see that the positive impact we aim to have on Australians and their finances is growing,” says Jamie Twiss, CEO of Beforepay.
“These milestones confirm the ongoing need for an ethical financial solution like Beforepay that gives customers flexibility, while also protecting them from the risk of long-term debt.”
Progress to profitability
This substantial growth comes at a time when Beforepay is making steady progress to profitability, with steady increases in user and advance numbers, sustainable unit economics, and tightly controlled costs.
For more information about Beforepay visit www.beforepay.com.au.
About Beforepay
Beforepay was founded in 2019 to support working Australians who have not been well-served 2by the traditional financial services industry.
Beforepay’s flagship pay advance product is an ethical, customer-friendly way to help people manage temporary cash flow challenges in a safe and affordable way. The product provides customers with early access to a portion of their pay, on demand, for a 5% fixed fee, to tide them over while living within their means.
Beforepay uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in its risk model, calculating approximately 500 separate attributes for each customer in order to determine their eligibility and set their limit.
Alongside this, Beforepay also offers a bespoke budgeting tool and real-time spending insights in the mobile app to equip customers with additional resources for responsible money management.
