Evolving into SAVii Asia, Uploan PH continues to partner with companies and offer salary loans to employees at manageable interest rates.

In a virtual media briefing held recently, SAVii Asia outlines the services it offers with the goal of providing employees with financial empowerment and education.

“Employee well-being is threatened by financial demands heightened by the pandemic,” said Liam Grealish, the CEO and founder of SAVii. “We are a platform that delivers financial services to employees that other formal financial institutions are unable to service.”

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As a startup company established in 2017, SAVii Asia saw the need to provide employees, with no prior access to formal credit, with a safe and affordable formal lending solution. This will also, hopefully, keep them away from loan sharks or online lending platforms that humiliate or threaten borrowers for unpaid or outstanding balances.

According to a SAVii survey of 10,000 employees, 90% of working Filipinos prefer to access financial products through salary deduction. From 18% a few years ago, the number of employees that accessed its financial products, with offerings of salary deduction payments, grew to 40%.

Terms, interest rates

SAVii offers risk-based pricing with personalized credit options depending on the employee’s tenure (one-month salary advance, or choices of 3, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months. Employees that are already three months in the company can already avail themselves of a loan. Interest rate can go to as low as 0.5% plus a 1% transaction fee.

Employers won’t carry any liability as the process is handled by the SAVii platform. To ensure that employees can manage their loans, SAVii’s offerings are designed not to exceed 25% of employees’ debt to income (DTI) ratio and repayments are salary deducted.

SAVii said in 2017, only 3% of all active loans in the Philippines were bank-issued. Employees secure loans from individual lenders within the workplace. Unstructured and unacceptably high-interest rates brought more problems to borrowers further sinking employees deeper into debt.