NOW Finance is a finalist at the 2022 Finder Awards in the category of risk-based personal loans. In a crowded field of loans and lenders, NOW Finance emerged as one of our top picks across the market.
But how do you decide what a good personal loan looks like? It’s a harder question to answer than you’d think. You can’t just look at interest rates, find the cheapest product and call it a day – especially with risk-based personal loans.
This is because lenders set different rates and fees depending on the borrower. That’s what risk-based pricing is all about. Borrowers with minimal debts and high credit scores get access to lower interest rates. And the lower your rate, the less interest you pay. Riskier borrowers, with lower credit scores, get higher interest rates. That’s just how it is.
So with the Finder Awards, we’ve created a set of different hypothetical borrowers, each with a different income, a different loan size and a different credit score. Then, we judge every loan against each of our hypothetical borrowers to determine the most competitive products.
And rather than rely on the interest rate, we’ve looked at comparison rates. A personal loan’s comparison rate is simply the interest rate, plus an estimate of fee costs factored in. It gives you a clearer sense of a loan’s true cost.
This means our winners and finalists are not just super low rate loans available for the ideal borrower. They’re loans that offer competitive interest rates (and lower fees) for multiple borrowers in different situations. It’s just a fairer way to judge these loans.
NOW Finance’s secured personal loan scored highly across these different example borrowers. And that’s why it performed so well in this year’s Finder Awards. It’s an all-round no-fee, low-rate loan.
There are other aspects a borrower should consider when looking at personal loans. This includes factors like fees, approval speed and the ability to make early repayments. It can be harder to measure products according to all these criteria. But they’re important to look at, too. And looking at these factors, NOW Finance is clearly a strong contender.
Written by Richard Whitten
Richard Whitten is an editor at Finder, covering the loans and the property market in Australia. He has written for Yahoo Finance, Money Magazine and Homely, as well as multiple banks and lenders. Richard has a Certificate IV in Finance and Mortgage Broking, a Bachelor of Education from the University of Sydney and a Graduate Certificate in Communication.
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