How We Make Money
Lendable Marketplace is free for you to use. Here's exactly how we're funded, and what that does — and doesn't — mean for what you see on this site.
Compare loans nowWe're an independent comparison site, not a lender
Lendable Marketplace is a comparison and information website. We are not a bank, a registered credit provider, a broker, or a financial advisor, and we do not lend money or make credit decisions ourselves. The lenders and loan-matching services listed on this site are independent businesses; each one makes its own decisions about who to approve, on what terms, and at what cost.
We publish information about these lenders — loan amounts, terms, rates, and eligibility criteria — sourced directly from what each lender states publicly about its own products. Where we don't have a verified figure for something (a specific fee structure, for example), we say so rather than guess.
How our funding works
Comparing loans on Lendable Marketplace costs you nothing. We're funded through affiliate partnerships: when you click through from our site to apply with one of our lenders, and that application results in an approved loan, we may receive a referral fee from that lender. This is a standard commercial model used across the financial comparison industry, both in South Africa and internationally.
Critically, this fee is paid by the lender, not by you. It doesn't add anything to the interest rate, fees, or total repayment amount you're quoted by the lender — the price you see and ultimately agree to is set by that lender directly, under the same statutory caps that apply to every registered credit provider in South Africa, regardless of whether you found them through us or anywhere else.
What our funding model doesn't change
Being funded this way creates an obvious incentive worth being upfront about: we only earn anything when you click through to, and are approved by, one of our lenders. We manage that incentive in a few concrete ways:
- We list all 15 of our current lenders with the same level of factual detail. Five occupy paid placements at the top of our comparison lists, with the first labelled Featured — that position is commercial. What it doesn't buy is different treatment in what we publish about them.
- We publish each lender's actual stated loan amounts, terms, and eligibility criteria — including where a lender's criteria may exclude you (for example, Prime Loans doesn't accept applicants under an administration order or debt counselling) — rather than only the flattering details.
- We don't invent claims a lender hasn't made itself, and we don't use prohibited marketing language such as "no credit check" or "guaranteed approval," which the National Credit Act treats as misleading regardless of who's making the claim.
- Our current affiliate relationships run through a specialist affiliate network for the lending industry; the underlying comparison and application tool on this site is provided through that partnership.
Why we compare 15 lenders, not one
A single-lender site has an obvious incentive to make its one product look as good as possible. We deliberately built Lendable Marketplace around a panel of 15 independent lenders instead, spanning both direct lenders and loan-matching services, because a comparison site only does its job if it genuinely helps you weigh real alternatives against each other — amount ranges, terms, and rates that differ meaningfully from lender to lender.
That also means we're upfront when a lender isn't a fit for a particular need. For example, several of our lender pages explain that certain lenders exclude applicants under debt review or administration, or that a lender's stated amount range doesn't reach a particular figure — rather than glossing over that to keep every lender looking universally applicable.
How we check each provider
For every lender and loan-matching service on our panel we check:
- Who it is: the company name, registration number and country, from the provider's own terms.
- NCR registration: the NCRCP number it publishes, which we look up on the National Credit Regulator's register. Providers that only pass your details to lenders are labelled loan-matching services, not credit providers.
- Costs and terms: amounts, terms, rates, fees and any worked example the provider publishes. Where nothing is published, we say so.
- Requirements and contact details: as stated on the provider's own website.
- Customer ratings: from Hellopeter or Trustpilot, with the number of reviews and the date we looked. We don't give our own star ratings.
We recheck the panel at least every three months, and whenever a provider tells us something has changed. The date on each review shows when we last checked it. We do not take out loans to test providers.
Corrections: if you spot something out of date or wrong, contact us. We check it against the source and correct the page, usually within five working days.
How our comparison tool is ordered
Our comparison tool shows five paid placements first by default, with the top one labelled Featured. That ordering is commercial: those five are the lenders whose arrangements earn us the most per click. We think showing you that in plain language is better than a supposedly neutral order that quietly does the same thing. No lender is ever hidden or removed from the tool, the full panel of 15 is always shown, and the sort control lets you reorder by NCR registration, loan amount or name at any time — NCR registered first is the ordering we'd recommend if what you care about is who is verifiably registered to lend in South Africa.
What we'd do differently if we only cared about revenue
It's worth being concrete about what a purely revenue-maximising version of this site would look like, since it helps explain some of the choices we've made instead. A site optimised only for referral income would list a single top-paying lender rather than 15, would omit any exclusion criteria that might talk a visitor out of clicking through, would use unverifiable "no credit check" or "guaranteed approval" language to maximise conversions, and would skip the compliance and eligibility content in our guides section entirely, since none of it directly drives a click to a lender's site. We've deliberately built the opposite of that — a wider panel, visible exclusions, factual language only, and a guides section that sometimes tells a visitor honestly that they're unlikely to qualify anywhere on our panel.
Questions about a specific lender or listing
If you believe anything on this site about a specific lender is inaccurate or out of date, or you have any other question about how we operate, please get in touch via our contact page. We'd rather correct a mistake than leave it up. The full legal terms covering your use of this site are set out in our terms and conditions, and our privacy policy explains exactly what we do and don't collect.