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 14 of our current lenders with the same level of factual detail, rather than steering you toward whichever pays the highest referral fee.
- We publish each lender's actual stated loan amounts, terms, and eligibility criteria — including where a lender's criteria may exclude you (for example, several lenders don't accept applicants with existing overdue debt) — 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 14 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 14 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 with existing overdue debt, 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 keep the comparison tool itself neutral
The comparison tool used on this site is provided through our affiliate network integration, the same infrastructure that tracks referrals and calculates the fees described above. We don't manually reorder or hide lenders within that tool to favour higher-paying relationships — the goal of the tool is to reflect the loan amounts, terms and criteria you enter, not our commercial arrangements with any one lender.
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 14, 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.