How do you see the current situation in the SA market? What about the future?
Like the rest of the world, there continues to be some turbulence in the consumer credit markets fuelled by the pandemic and with potential new trends emerging. Wider economic and political incidents continue to impact the consumer sentiment and outlook, and these will shape the markets recovery.
Full recovery is imminent, credit providers must constantly monitor for shifts in consumer behaviour and swiftly adapt to the changing demands and preferences. The road to recovery requires being proactive, adaptive, and informed.
To achieve our goals, we have significantly improved our scoring methodology to evaluate the clients’ creditworthiness with a high degree of accuracy and fairness. While this post-covid turbulence remains, a significant increase in demand for online financial services has emerged in comparison to the prior popularity of offline brick and mortar MFIs before the pandemic. Lockdowns and restrictions during the pandemic have seriously inhibited the growth and development of these offline MFIs.
As confirmation of the above and the current demand for online lending, the volume of loans disbursed by Lime Loans South Africa has grown by 71% between January and October 2021.
Are you planning any new products or modification of existing products? Which ones will appear on Bondster?
Installment loans with repayment terms between 3 and 6 months will be tested in 2022 to further improve the current value proposition for clients with a good repayment history. This will give them the opportunity to access bigger loan values, but with reduced monthly installments.
Once thoroughly tested, both the Installment Loan and Payday Loan offering will appear on Bondster.
What are your plans for the future that might be attractive to investors?
Lime Loans South Africa will significantly scale its business in South Africa in 2022, it is planned to more than double its current monthly originations. Supporting this planned growth in 2022, Lime Loans South Africa is also investing in a new loan management software, new collections software and the use of automated expense categorization of the bank statement data, using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Software to reduce mistakes of human intervention.
Secondly, Lime Loans South Africa will expand to the additional regions in Africa in 2023. This expansion will primarily focus on the payroll lending, where loan installments are collected by the borrower’s employer and paid over to the lender. This collection method poses significantly less risk of loans going into default with historical collection rates between 95% and 98%. In addition, credit life insurance is added to the loan product to further safeguard the lender if the borrower dies. This will provide investors the opportunity to make high yielding, longer term investments with reduced risk.
What would you like to tell our investors?
For the past years Lime Loans South Africa has been showing a stable growth even during the covid and post covid era. Since the beginning of 2021 the company has been planning expansions within the African market which it will realize in 2023. Lime Loans South Africa’s success is as a result of synergy between the high professional standards of employees and its advanced technologies used within its operations. This will continue to remain one of our main focus points for the future.
Follow the link to read the full version of the interview:
www.bondster.com/en/novinky/vsechny/interview-with-jaco-coetzee-managing-director-of-lime-loans-south-africa