An investor asked me last year to please, for the love of money, change our tagline.

We were somewhere around slide 14 when he put down his coffee, leaned forward, and said it with the quiet seriousness of someone trying to stop a friend from jumping off a bridge.

The offending line was, "all credit is bad, ours as well".

He thought it was commercial suicide. I thought it was the most honest sentence in our deck. We did not close that round.

Here is the thing though. Nobody, in the history of human beings, has ever woken up excited to take out a loan. People want a car, a deposit, a trip home, a month of breathing room.

Credit is the least painful way to get there when it works, and a trap with a friendly interest rate when it doesn't. Our industry has spent twenty years pretending otherwise.

We dressed a cost up as a lifestyle. We gave credit cards names like Platinum and Sapphire, as if you were being inducted into a secret society instead of agreeing to pay 29% on a sofa. We told people the right card said something about them. It did. Just not the thing the ad suggested.

At Fairlo we try to do the boring version of this industry. Credit that costs what it costs. Numbers you can read without a magnifying glass. A product that lets you out as easily as it lets you in.

It is not a manifesto. It is the stuff that should have been table stakes decades ago. Boring is a difficult thing to put on a pitch deck, I will admit. It is also the only version of lending I can explain to my mum without needing a running start.

Why put all of this in a tagline? Because growth makes you forget. Targets make you forget. Spreadsheets especially make you forget. Writing the uncomfortable sentence on the wall is one small way of not drifting. So far, it is working.

The investor, to his credit, is still watching from a polite distance. I suspect he is waiting for us to come to our senses. He may be waiting a while.

Jimmy Hanna
CEO & Co-Founder, Fairlo UK Limited