Smile Loan Opinion (Smile)

Member Name: consumerist

Product:	Smile
Date:	19/10/02 (661 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Online, Easy to see loan details, Integrated with your existing accounts with smile (if any)

Disadvantages: APR slightly higher than some others, No payment flexibility, Early repayment incurs a charge

Smile Information
smile.co.uk is a reletively new online bank but is spawned from the well established co-operative bank. The company have won various awards including "best online current account", "best savings account", "best credit card" and "best website" most recently.

Smile market themselves as being "open, ethical and genuingly modern". You only have to visit their website to see that they are not your average high street bank, far from it, for example they currently have a poll running on their main page entitled "Which bananas do you buy?" with the options "the cheapest", "fair trade", and "yes, we have no bananas". Bizarre eh?

Loan Rate
At the time of writing this opinion the bank offers interest on two levels depending on how much you would like to borrow. Loans from £1,500 to £4,950 incur a 11.9% APR rate and £5,000 - £15,000 a lower 8.9% APR rate. It's a fairly low rate, but you can easily find a lower and more flexable one assuming you have a good credit score.

Opinion
Smile was not my first choice for the provider of my loan, but unfortunately having just moved house my credit score seemed to fail for the other major providers. When I applied to smile, my application was accepted immediately - perhaps this is because I have my current account and credit card account when them and I was automatically considered a eligable customer.

Unfortunately I ran into a problem during the setup of my loan, the payment date for my repayments had been set automatically, whereas I wanted it to leave my account on a particular date. This change in my application delayed the funds being transferred into my account by about 1 week, they had to cancel the first application and prepare a new one.

Smiles online banking system is fairly user friendly, reliable and nice to use. As I already bank with them, it was really co
nvienient to have my loan account together with my other ones.

Unfortunately, the biggest disadvantage of this loan is that it is not flexible, you are not able to increase or decrease payments, and paying the outstanding balance of early means you will have to pay a fee.

I have always found smile to be very helpful, but often find it can take them a couple of days to reply to secure messages online.

If you are not looking for a flexible loan, and are happy with their APR rate then I would fully recommend this product. An additional benefit is that you can sleep easy, knowing that your money is being invested "ethically" as stipulated by the banks ethos. Sweet dreams.

Summary: