RateSetter Awards: Now Wins Ethical Lending Badge

If lending fairly, with your borrower's interests in mind, is important to you, RateSetter has just received an award that should boost your confidence in it.

RateSetter is overflowing with awards like almost no other financial company. It's clearly doing something right.

But this new award is one of the special ones. This one is real. It's not like one of those industry awards that seem to get passed around so every bank and financial institution can put up glowing badges on their websites, showing customers how great and fluffy they are to everyone around them.

RateSetter award for “acting in the public interest”

While RateSetter is a company and obviously needs and wants to make a good profit, it has clearly decided the best way to achieve its goals is to do the right thing. (This is music to our hearts at 4thWay, because treating you right is at the centre of our business plan. We just hope to get a fraction of the size of RateSetter's profits!)

The RateSetter award is from the FairLife Foundation, a charitable and social movement. It was in recognition of RateSetter's loans products that “act in the best interests of the public”.

Mind you, this won't be all RateSetter's loans products. RateSetter now does property and business loans, as well as personal loans. It was the personal loans that won the Personal Loan Mark

FairLife Personal Loans must not:

• Charge an interest rate greater than the cap set by Government for credit unions, currently 3% per month.
• Leave a permanent record with a credit reference agency that a customer has requested a FairLife loan quote.
• Use the number of times a customer has requested a loan quote as an input in pricing the loan

It's quite sad that there's an award for this. What's even more sad is that so few lenders have been awarded this so far.

RateSetter reveals that one other P2P lending company has got it, but we don't know which that is yet. The only other recipients have been three credit unions. No word from the banks yet.

RateSetter has the lowest 4thWay^® Risk Rating, basically being barely a smidgeon more risky than savings accounts, but with much higher interest rates.

*Commission, fees and impartial research: our service is free to you. 4thWay shows dozens of P2P lending accounts in our accurate comparison tables and we add new ones as they make it through our listing process. We receive compensation from and other P2P lending companies not mentioned above either when you click through from our website and open accounts with them, or to cover the costs of conducting our calculated stress tests and ratings assessments. We vigorously ensure that this doesn't affect our editorial independence. Read How we earn money fairly with your help.

The 4thWay^® Risk Ratings were devised by experienced investors and a debt specialist from one of the major accountancy firms. The score is calculated using objective criteria that can be measured and improved over time, although no risk-scoring system is perfect. Read more about the 4thWay^® Risk Ratings.