You probably have never heard of a tribal lending company called Payday Financial LLC. Sometimes a tribal lender will set-up a holding company (usually the limited liability company) and then operate some subsidiary companies, which are usually the branded (retail facing) companies that do business with the public. These also tend to be companies that share the same name as the tribal lender. So for instance Great Sky Cash is also the GreatSkyCash.com website name.
Did you ever wonder why the largest Native American lender vanished from the scene? Why did Western Sky just stop issuing loans and wrap-up their business altogether?
It has a lot to do with a group of affiliated companies, including Payday Financial LLC, and how these companies chose to arrange their business licensing.
Payday Financial LLC was not (is not) a public facing tribal lender. Instead, they were the company that held the family of tribal lending firms in a basket. Sometimes it's hard to follow the trail and see all of the subsidiary companies when you look at a Native American lender. That's the case with Western Sky Financial. Most people would think there would just be a single company name, or possibly a second name for the behind the scenes holding and financing arm of the business.
But take a look at the organizational structure of Western Sky in this Maryland legal document, which you can see here. The organization is very complex and shows us just how many smaller LLC's are tied to the main company.
Payday Financial LLC is just one of many components of this now fading tribal lender. The main company (by far the most popular) is Western Sky Financial. Most people who have followed Native American lending to any degree will recognize this name. They ran television ads, radio ads, they had an elaborate relationship with a company called CashCall that managed their accounts. The company had many accounts, at least in the tens of thousands. But when we draw the curtain back we see an entire array of smaller lending (or financing) firms doing the same type of business.
Payday Financial LLC looks as if they were a financing portion of the overall organization. This would be the element that would supply the funds to issue the loans. So if the larger organization needed $10 million to lend out it would be Payday Financial LLC that would have procured those funds and then in turn provided those funds to Western Sky and the other retail facing pieces of the company.
What were some of those other retail pieces? There are some obscure names here, and at the same time evidently they had thousands of customers so they couldn't have been that unknown. These smaller lenders include Lakota Cash, Great Sky Cash, Big Sky Cash and Great Sky Finance. All of these firms have similar names and they all conducted a very similar line of business.
Western Sky Financial was the 'big' lender in the operation and this was the business that issued the more popular installment loans. It appears (although not for certain) that the smaller lenders, like Great Sky Cash, offered the more conventional payday loan product.
It's not surprising that Western Sky had smaller arms of the company, and it's also not too surprising that these smaller units would be involved in the payday lending aspect of tribal lending. It's a highly lucrative business and it technically would involve less risk that the Western Sky (installment lending) part of the business which issues larger loans and is exposed to greater losses if a customer fails to repay.
Payday Financial LLC sits (or sat, depending on what the status of this whole organization is now) at the center of these companies. The reason you never did business with this firm is because it only did business with the retail arms. So in a sense, if you had a loan through Western Sky or Big Sky Cash, then you did in fact have a once removed business relationship with Payday Financial. They went out and borrowed the money from some big wholesale lender, so that Western Sky could loan the money to you.
For anyone trying to learn more about Payday Financial LLC, this is the back story to where they fit in the big debt machine known to most people as Western Sky.
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