Could Wonga's critics be any Wronga?
Posted by Christie Malry on January 6, 2013 at 8:17 am
The Guardian has a slightly crowing piece about Wonga's bad debts:
Wonga's latest accounts show the firm wrote off £76.8m during 2011 because thousands of loans proved to be "uncollectable". The bad debt bill is equivalent to 41% of Wonga's £185m revenues for the year and is almost four times the figure for 2010. Filings at Companies House spell out that an associated accounting impairment was "mainly related to customers who are in unexpectedly difficult economic situations".
A spotlight on the legion of financially distressed Wonga borrowers comes at a sensitive time for the booming payday loans industry. The company recorded pretax profits up £45.5m to £62.4m for 2011
Sure, £62m on turnover of £185m is a lot of profit. But it has to be considered in the context of the bad debt writeoffs of £77m. As I have argued before, payday loans companies need to charge high APRs because their loans are for a short period of time and they know that there's a significant risk that they won't get their money back. Therefore they need to charge enough interest to those who do pay their loans back to cover the bad debt cost of those who do not.
I'm sure Wonga would much rather it could know in advance who was going to default. Then it could charge its non-defaulting customers a lot less for its service. But that's not the way lending works. Necessarily, it has to be approached as a portfolio, and that means borrowers who repay must pay more to cover the cost of those who don't.
And, given how it was bad debts that brought the banking sector to its knees, isn't it a bit ironic that this segment of the industry is being taken to task for behaving responsibly?
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@fcablog Quite right. Critics arrantly miss Wonga's selling point to punters, too: people happy to pay for clarity.
I don't find this in the least surprising - profound ignorance of how finance works Is in the paper's DNA. It might be worth one of the few worthwhile journalists in the Guardian, Nick Davies, doing one of his investigations into the sector of the market which would be providing the loans in the absence of Wonga. Somehow I don't see 'poster girl' Stella Creasy asking the local loan sharks to 'hand out flyers' at a 'Community Debt Action fair' , Do you?