Beforepay Group Ltd

Ethical Lender of the Year – Australia 2023 –

Beforepay is a mission-driven, direct-to-consumer organisation providing ethical loans and financial management tools to support the financial wellbeing of working Australians.

Established in 2019, Beforepay focuses on supporting working Australians who have been underserved by traditional financial services.

Beforepay’s flagship pay advance product provides eligible customers with access to up to $2000 of their pay, on-demand, for a simple 5% fixed transaction fee, with no interest or late fees. This offers a safe and affordable way to manage temporary cash-flow challenges while avoiding hidden fees and revolving debt charged by conventional lending products.

Funds are transferred into customers’ bank accounts nearly instantly, and repayments are aligned with customers’ pay cycles. Beforepay’s instant fund transfers and flexible repayments gives customers control and convenience when it comes to managing their finances.

Alongside this, Beforepay offers a bespoke budgeting tool and real-time spending insights within the mobile app to equip customers with additional resources for responsible money management. These tools not only support the navigation of temporary cash-flow challenges, but also encourage responsible financial habits.

Beforepay is committed to ethical lending practices and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in its best-in-class credit decisioning model to ensure fair and responsible lending.

Developed by a team of data scientists, Beforepay’s ML models are trained and validated on hundreds of millions of data points, searching over 50,000 features to determine the best 500 attributes for each customer. These attributes range from average monthly expenditure across a range of categories to income volatility.

This advanced approach powers Beforepay’s ability to accurately identify eligible customers and helps to ensure limits are within customers’ means, resulting in strong repayment rates and low probabilities of defaults.

As an industry leader in risk modelling using AI/ML, Beforepay exemplifies how technology can be successfully harnessed to deliver ethical, responsible, and customer-centric financial services, revolutionising the lending landscape.

Beforepay has maintained an ethical, customer-centred approach to lending, prioritising customers’ financial wellbeing while experiencing remarkable growth in a relatively short period. Since its commercial launch in August 2020, the organisation has garnered more than 1 million registered users.

By showing that an ethical and customer-centric business model can thrive in the FinTech industry, Beforepay is actively contributing to a shift in the financial landscape – one that values and protects customers while fostering responsible lending practices.