Sky Lending is a very basic tribal lending company that doesn't give us much to talk about. Let's look at this lender and see if anything appears on the internet horizon that is a surprise, interesting or noteworthy.
Alright, I spent the last 10 minutes looking and there is nothing interesting about this company. The only thing that does stand out is that the company appears to have made the jump from being a Native American lender to a state licensed lender because there is no indication or verbiage on the company site (as of now in June 2015) that the company has any tribal affiliation. This is a change because early in 2014 the company was part of a larger network of tribal loan companies.
In fact, Sky Lending was part of a much more famous (or infamous, as time has told us) tribal lender named Western Sky Financial. We all remember Western Sky, right? They had TV spots, radio commercials, they were in printed newspapers and had all kinds of material pushing their loans on the internet. Western Sky was the de facto king of Native American lending and they loved being in that role.
Meanwhile, a lesser company that was owned by the same tribal organization (which just as an aside turned out to not be a fully compliant or registered tribal lending entity which is partly the reason they folded) and that is the firm we are discussing here, Sky Lending.
Sky Lending was a back-up to Western Sky or more likely an afterthought to the organization. Why? It's because Western Sky was using up all the oxygen, they were the dominant company by far in the business.
But it all ended quickly when Western Sky was sued by some private citizens (unhappy ex-customers) and some state regulators. Then the federal government started to inquire as to whether Western Sky had put together the company in the proper manner when they were founded and it turns out they had not filed the right paperwork.
Western Sky was company founded by a leading member of a tribal nation but not by the actual tribe itself. Not long after that discovery Western Sky announced that they would be liquidating the company after all the existing loans were paid off or otherwise disposed of.
Sky Lending apparently was not far behind its bigger brother. As of the middle of 2014 Sky Lending still had their website operating but it didn't appear they were doing much marketing, if they were doing any at all.
Somewhere between last summer and May of 2015 the tribal version of this company was closed and must have quickly appeared again as this state licensed lender which is the site you will find if you go there right now.
In the end the question is should you (the consumer) use the modern incarnation of Sky Lending? The answer is a maybe, leaning towards a no. Yes, the current version of Sky Lending is an improvement over the tribal version in that the loans this company will issue range around 390% APR. That's a solid improvement over the 782% APR that was being pushed by the old (tribal) Sky Lending. So on the surface you would have to say the current lender is better.
On the other hand we do have a few drawbacks now. For starters it will be more difficult to qualify for the Sky Lending loan than it was in the past. State licensed lenders have more obligations (and tendencies) to check on the financial health of their applicants. That leads to a second problem which is the modern company could (or one of their lending network partners) check your credit rating or score against Equifax, Transunion or Experian. And we should probably upgrade that "could" to the fact that they most likely will check your credit. For some consumers this is no big deal but for others this will be a deal breaker.
For my own personal borrowing needs I am going to stick with the easy going nature of top quality tribal lenders such as Spotloan, Mobiloans and Plain Green Loans. If you really want to use a payday lender then try one of the more progressive tribal lenders which is called RadiantCash. This firm has a great program for repeat customers where the customer keeps getting better interest rates each time they borrow.
Truthfully, I would not have borrowed from the old Sky Lending with their tribal ties and I would not borrow from the current Sky Lending either. There is just no incentive or anything innovative about either version of the company.
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