2020: What A Year!

2020 – what a year it has been! A global pandemic, lockdowns, closed borders, layoffs, social distancing, masks… Followed by CERB, CEBA, CRB, CEWS and all the programs the government launched to help those in need. There is no doubt that this year has been a turbulent time for Canadians. With all of that, our team has dedicated significant resources to make pandemic-related information readily available to all of our users. We also spent the year launching new programs and projects to make the Loans Canada experience the best it’s ever been.

These are some of our highlights from this year:

New Website

Over the years we noticed that as we continuously produced more content, a lot of the older resources we created were becoming harder to find. Our website was designed to favour new content over old content, and that meant our users were missing out on some of the best information we have.

This year we completely revamped our website with the sole intention of making our great content resources more accessible.

We completely redesigned our homepage. We also created a new menu system to make it easier for users to search for lenders and service providers regionally. Lastly, we developed detailed guides to help users navigate their way around the service they are searching for.

We created extensive guides for:

• Personal Loans
• Debt Relief
• Business Loans
• Credit Building
• Car Loans
• Home Equity Loans

With all of this, we hope it is now a lot easier for our users to make more informed decisions about what products and services to apply for, and which providers are best suited for them.

Financial Literacy Scholarship

2020 was also the year we launched our Financial Literacy Scholarship. We want to encourage and recognize young Canadians who have made their financial health a priority while working hard to achieve their post-secondary education goals. We’re awarding $750 to one student every semester. So far we’re proud to announce we’ve awarded the prize to two students:

• Elizabeth Gagne from McGill University
• Nathan Le from University of Alberta

Surveys & Research

This year we expanded our content development efforts to include original studies with data gained from Canadians themselves. Our goal is to shine a light on the experiences Canadians have in the alternative lending industry.

In 2020 we published three studies:

• Financial Literacy vs. Financial Well-Being And Credit-Constrained Canadians
• COVID-19 Study: Vulnerable Canadians Falling Through The Cracks
• Alternative Lending Study: The Borrowing Experience

Spotlight

Along with our new website, we also created a new website section named Loans Canada Spotlight where we feature interviews, news and bring attention to many of Canada’s most innovative companies and individuals in the credit and FinTech space.

Media

This year we are proud to say Loans Canada appeared in the media more than ever before! Our CEO appeared live on BNN Bloomberg and on multiple podcasts, including the FinTech Cadence Podcast, Build Wealth Canada and Payments Innovation. Our surveys and their results were featured on CBC News and on the radio, and some of our results were published in major newspapers such as The Toronto Star and The Hamilton Spectator. We’re very proud to have our work featured on major media outlets and we hope to keep this momentum going into the new year.

A Note on COVID-19

We know COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on everybody this year. Throughout the year we tried our best to communicate COVID-19 information to the community as it became available, and we truly hope that has helped some of our users deal with some of the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic.

On our COVID-19 resource page you can still find aggregated information and frequently asked questions about government programs, subsidies and benefits to help Canadians impacted by the coronavirus and lockdowns. If you have any specific questions we recommend you message us on Facebook and we can try to answer them as best we can.

When the pandemic started, and with all of the uncertainty around it, a lot of lenders really cut back on their operations and that made it difficult for a lot of people to find credit. On that regard, thankfully things are largely back to normal now. We will continue to report on any news to help Canadians stay informed.

And that’s all for now! From the Loans Canada family to yours, we wish you a happy holiday season and a happy new year!

Stay safe everyone!