Jane’s story is not isolated, it’s a story shared by thousands across the country and a story that is of increasing focus in our national media and political ranks. Jane is a 32-year-old single mother who works 28 hour weeks as a local bank teller while supporting her two children. She is one of the thousands of Australians who have been down a long and grueling path of financial insecurity. The 11th of March is her youngest daughter, Lili’s birthday. In 2018, Lili was turning 7 and as every mother wants, Jane wanted to make Lili feel like a princess by throwing a small party. The only issue was that she was 4 days out from payday and with insufficient funds to throw her a party or buy presents, she reached out to her bank for an overdraft facility to be set up. Unfortunately, her bank no longer ‘sold’ personal overdrafts and having borrowed too much from family and friends to be comfortable going back for more, her options were limited.

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Her only logical alternative was a well marketed, online ‘payday’ lender - a high cost, short-term loan provider. A $300 loan (the minimum amount at this particular lender) was approved and granted almost immediately. What she and many others didn’t realise is that the initial $300 will balloon to $380 over a 2 month repayment period. Her income wasn’t enough to wear the additional cost 2 months down the line, so like many others, she turned to another lender for a second loan. Tens of stories resembling Jane’s were shared in the recent weeks during the inquiry into the payday loan industry (Senate Inquiry into Financial Hardship).

In Australia:
• 1 in 5 people do not have access to savings.

• There are $31 billion dollars currently accruing interest charges on our credit cards.

•  And, 643,087 households have turned to payday loans in the past 3 years. With, the average number of loans per household being 3.64. That’s 2,340,837 payday loans...

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A large majority (35.6%) of these loans are taken out for ‘emergency cash for household expenses’.
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...In Australia, it is expensive to be poor.

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We built Earnd to help the millions of hard-working Aussies access fair credit based on their earnings - to remove the dependency of the income you’ve rightfully earned on an arbitrary date stipulated by your employer. Or simply, to give you access to your income, as you earn it. We soon found that it wasn’t just those in marginalised or vulnerable positions who valued the flexibility of accessing what’s theirs on their terms. Highly paid professionals who are used to the freedom of food, media, and transport on demand, also value the freedom of being able to access their income on demand. One of our loyal Earner's now draws a portion of their pay daily into their offset account, nabbing a few hundred dollars of savings a year...pretty clever!

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We also found that employers really care. Employers with varied employee demographics from the hourly worker in retail to the highly paid salaried staff in our most prestigious financial institutions - all of their employers care. And, they care deeply. They are increasingly focused on the welfare and wellbeing of their people. Not only because they are good people, passionate about making a difference in their roles but because they recognise the value of having a happy and productive workforce. A value that is not only fluffy in the sense of happier people but tangible in the sense of genuine bottom-line improvements.

You don’t have to take it from us though...as the experts say:
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“Our research shows that employer-sponsored “Fintech” based benefits that take advantage of the powerful “salary link” - automatic payment through salary deduction - can provide more efficient, less costly and more inclusive liquidity and credit solutions.
These FinTech products also show tantalizing potential for significantly reducing employee turnover and saving millions of expense dollar annually at large employers.”-- Harvard

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Earnd is about providing a solution that puts people first and supports employers in supporting their people. We like to think of ourselves as a group of passionate individuals driven to take an important step in the right direction toward giving every Australian access to what’s rightfully theirs when they need it. A passionate team, on a mission to change pay and help millions of Aussies along the way.

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