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Politics

Wonga may be facing collapse—but the conditions it profited from remain

No-one sensible will shed a tear for Wonga. But its success was a symptom of something bigger: the failure to provide vulnerable people with a desperately-needed safety net

By Dawn Foster  
August 30, 2018

The home page of Wonga's company website with a message stating that they have stopped taking new loan applications. Photo: PA

When Wonga was established, the advertising for the company pitched the payday loan company as something new and original in finance. Cutesy graphics framed sliding buttons laying out the interest and repayment period of each loan, and the ads for the business followed you around the internet and nestled in the ad breaks on whichever channel you watched.

In reality, they were identical to all the other high-interest…

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Dawn Foster

Dawn Foster is a writer with a focus on politics and social affairs. She is a contributing editor at Guardian Housing and the author of Lean Out (Repeater Books, 2016)

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