Everyone makes mistakes and this site (Native Loans) is not above making an error once every now and then. We have found a bit of an overlap in our review of two similar sounding online lenders.
One company is older, and that's the firm called Sky Lending. This company may have been part of a tribal lending group in the past but we are not sure. There is no public record of previous ownership because the site is privately held. Disclosure over who owns these short-term lending companies has never been very accessible, and that goes for both the Native American and non-tribal lenders.
Sky Lending is a direct lender that has to conform to the various state laws regarding short-term lending, and so is Sky Loan Online. Again, this appears to have been a former tribal lender but we can't be sure.
It's pretty obvious what both of these firms are trying to accomplish with their names. The biggest online (unsecured) lender of all time was a company called Western Sky Financial.
If you haven't been following any news about online lending then you missed the fact that Western Sky went down in a ball of flames under a lot of pressure from state governments (specifically their financial regulation divisions) led by New York, along with a fair number of private lawsuits and some questioning by the federal government about the legal framework the company had been set-up under.
It turned out that Western Sky Financial had been put together by a leading member of a Native American tribe and had used the land of a tribe, but the company itself had not been legally formed as a tribal lending entity. This opened up all kinds of trouble for the company as it had to contend with suits and inquiries into whether or not their high priced loans had even been legal to provide since they really should have been regulated by the state, in this case it would have been the state of South Dakota.
Let's skip ahead to the end, and all you need for our purposes today is that Western Sky had been extremely popular and they collapsed quite abruptly under a lot of scrutiny and turmoil. In the end their success proved to be their downfall.
In the wake of this very popular lender falling apart it looks as though many companies are trying to set-up loan operations that take advantage of the word "sky" in their name. It looks to me like they want to appear to be the company that replaced Western Sky, or at least replaced the firm in the mind of all the people who are looking for where Western Sky went to.
Sky Loan Online, Sky Lending, the theme is consistent. I think these lenders want whatever desire is left in the world for the old $10K loans that Western Sky provided to come their way. Unfortunately for both of them they don't even begin to match the loan amounts that Western Sky did back in 2010 and 2011. Western Sky would issue "small" loans for $2,600 and $3,500. Companies like Sky Loan Online and Sky Lending would be lucky to get their clients $1K, if they even did that.
The final point here is its important not to confuse Sky Loan Online with Sky Lending. It's also somewhat important to realize that both of these firms may have been tribal lenders in the past few years and now they are both state licensed lenders, which means there will be more hoops to jump through if you want to get a loan from either of these online shops. And the last note is that neither of these firms are anywhere near what Western Sky used to be, in case you were mixing up the "sky" part of the names. Neither of these lenders even begins to resemble the quality of loans (albeit very expensive) that Western Sky would offer their customers.
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