My Quick Funds has entered the tribal lending arena with very little fanfare and it seems unlikely that they are going to make many waves in the industry.
One of the best determining factors of whether or not a new Native American lender will be successful or not is the quality, and usability, of their website. Although this might seem trite to say that a non-quality website will be the make or break for a business it seems like a strong trend.
It might have to do with the trust factor, where if I am about to provide all my critical personal information (social security number, mailing address, phone number, income, employer information, checking account number, bank routing number, basically all the pertinent facts that entail your financial picture) then I want to use a website that looks like it was constructed with some care on the part of the owner. We want to see a site that looks like it has solid data security with encryption and security all over the place.
When a person (a potential customer) lands on My Quick Funds it just looks like a website that was put up on the net very quickly. There does not seem to have a quality look to it. People have become so familiar with the internet now that they have an inherent feel for a website that looks like it was carefully put together or if it was slapped up by some contractor in a few days. For the lack of a better term we are able to decipher which sites have that "corporate" look and which ones have that "built by some guy who is unemployed" look.
Unfortunately for My Quick Funds the site falls into the category of built by some guy is unemployed look. The site just looks clunky and not like a page that I personally would want to submit my highly sensitive personal financial information into and then send it through the cyberspace.
The company website is pretty user friendly but it's not as good as sites like Plain Green Loans and Mobiloans, or even the somewhat clunky nature of Spotloan. All of those lenders have pages and data entry fields that I feel secure using. But all in all the My Quick Funds site is rather fluid and easy to use.
Beyond the security, quality and ease of use of the website the real question most people have about any lender is will I qualify for a loan and how much can I borrow? And for how long?
These questions are where My Quick Funds really fails the test for my own needs and requirements for a tribal lender. Of course it is very simple to qualify so there is no need to discuss this except to say the usual, which is you can't be part of the active U.S. military, you can't be under 18 years old and you have to have some degree of income that can be checked by the company. There is really nothing to the getting approved part of the loan process with this loan firm, or for any tribal lender for that matter.
The important question is whether they are going to qualify for your expectations and standards. My Quick Funds is not doing that for me, and the big reason is the initial loan amount that is allowed for any customer is $500. If I am going to apply for a loan (and I have more than a few times with a good number of tribal loan shops) one of my main concerns is that the lender will not supply enough cash to me. And it simply is a bad sign that this lender (and plenty of others too, this is not unique to My Quick Funds) uses the language "up to $500" on the first loan.
That makes me nervous that they will not fund me up to their first time maximum, which as we mentioned, is already too low of an amount. In general I want to have access to at least $1,500 for the initial loan. Is that too much to ask for a client who is not a known quantity to the lender? Evidently the answer these days is "yes" as more lenders slide away from those larger initial loan amounts.
The early customers of tribal loan companies (like myself) will remember Western Sky Financial which set the pace for the rest of the industry by offering up to $10K loans to an individual and rarely funding a loan for anything less than $1,000 per customer. My first loan with that (now defunct) lender was $2,800 and that was the lower tier of what they offered.
Some of the more popular Native American lenders that followed Western Sky, such as Plain Green Loans and Great Plains Lending, offered up to $3K as a maximum loan, which was not too bad. This is the range that I feel is more appropriate and more useful to a person looking to go into debt. Although some customers only want $300 and that makes a company like My Quick Funds more palatable I know from experience that there are a certain block of customers that will not find their loans helpful at all due to the low dollar level.
In defense of My Quick Loans they do say that customers that take out several loans with the firm and successfully repay those loans will become eligible (eventually) for a maximum loan amount of $1,500 and that does get into the range of where I would find the lender acceptable. However, who wants to go through the process of taking out multiple loans and repaying them just to get to the point where we want to be when we walk through the door as a new customer?
The answer is 'not me' because I am assuming that I can be welcome to a larger loan just by agreeing to be the customer of a tribal lender. Maybe that's living in the past but I don't think so. There are still some tribal loan companies that will help with larger loans, like Plain Green Loans is quite good and if you live in a state that Mobiloans still issues loans then they are a very good option as well.
At the same time we have to be honest and say that the number of companies that issued bigger loans has vanished, like Western Sky and another good firm called Clear Creek Lending which is no longer around.
My quick assessment of My Quick Funds is to quickly keep looking elsewhere for a tribal loan. If nothing else look at the tribal payday lending team over at RadiantCash and see what they have going on, which is a very good customer building program that consistently lowers your interest rate if you do keep taking out small loans.
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