Community lender reveals social and economic impact of credit access

New figures from affordable credit provider Salad demonstrated that it has saved more than 90,000 workers over £41 million pounds in interest during 2024-25.

The firm, which lends to people with poor or impaired credit scores who want and can afford to repay small sum loans, calculated that its customers saved an average of £454 each on an average loan of £1075 compared with other lenders available to and commonly used by its applicants.

Rather than credit scores, Salad uses Open Banking and its own human- and machine-learning technology to make lending decisions, saying this addresses fundamental flaws in how the credit scoring system treats millions of people.
 
Over 16 million people are ‘financially underserved’ with £2 billion of unmet credit needs, which could be both responsible and commercially viable to serve, according to recent work by LEK research. Salad says that this shortfall in access to fair credit doesn’t only drive people towards extremely high-cost and illegal lending – bad enough outcomes alone – it also acts as a drag on economic productivity and effective participation in the workforce.

Tim Rooney, Salad CEO, said “Tackling the credit desert isn’t just about fairness and boosting financial wellbeing. Expanding access to affordable credit can support economic growth: by building more resilient communities, supporting productivity and participation in the economy, and saving interest which can be used to build savings and spent in local economies.
 
“We must expand access to fair credit and enable people for whom borrowing is impossible to rebuild their financial wellbeing, rather than write them off.”