Ad description
A TV ad for a payday loan company featured a man and a puppet playing guitars. The voice-over stated "With wonga.com, you're always in control. You decide how much you want to borrow and for how long, and we tell you how much it'll cost. Money is sent within five minutes of approval, guaranteed. wonga.com; little loans, lots of control."
Issue
One complainant objected that the ad misleadingly implied that funds would be received in all recipients' accounts within five minutes of the loan being accepted.
Response
WDFC UK Ltd t/a Wonga did not believe the ad implied that applicants would receive payments within five minutes. They believed the ad clearly stated that it arranged for money to be sent, but said it made no comment about how long it would take for customers to receive the money in their accounts. They said that whilst Wonga controlled the speed with which they instructed their banks to send money to their customers, they were not able control the speed with which their customers' banks made that money available to them. They referred to their website which stated that most banks were able to process their real-time bank transfers within 15 minutes, but that this could take longer due to issues well beyond their control
Clearcast said the claim "Money is sent within five minutes of approval, guaranteed" related to the time within which the funds were released and did not imply that the funds would be in the recipient's bank account during this time.
Assessment
Not upheld
The ASA considered that viewers would understand the claim "Money is sent within five minutes of approval, guaranteed" as a literal reference to the speed at which loan payments were issued by Wonga following confirmation of a successful application and not a claim about the time frame within which a payment would be cleared in the recipient account. We considered that most viewers would be aware that money transfers varied from bank to bank and that the sender bank had no influence over how or when the recipient bank would clear the funds into an individual's account. Although we considered that customers applying for a loan through a payday loan company would be likely to want the money as a matter of urgency, we considered this would not result in the expectation that issued loans were always instantly cleared into their accounts and considered most consumers would understand that it could take up to an hour for a transfer to go through. We understand that in most cases the transfer actually took 15 minutes with a few smaller banks taking a little longer, sometimes resulting in payment the following day where the payment was issued by Wonga after 3pm. We considered that this timeframe fell within the consumer's likely expectation of when the sent money would be received into their accounts and therefore concluded that the ad was not misleading.
We considered the ad under BCAP Code rules 3.1 3.1 Advertisements must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation) but did not find it in beach.
Action
No further action required.
