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Deferit assesses all customer bills. When we see any indicator that a customer is in hardship, we deny the bill deferral and refer them to get in contact with their bill provider to seek assistance. We encourage customers to interact with their bill providers, even when they may not be aware such an avenue exists. We advocate hardship solutions offered by billers and have a strict responsible budgeting code of conduct.

Traditional finance solutions (such as credit cards and personal loans) can obfuscate hardship from billers with the debt able to revolve while outstanding balances accrue interest.

Billers have full visibility over their accounts just like they do with any other payment method.

If a customer is behind on a payment they are unable to defer further bills. The account is paused as soon as any 14 day payment window is missed, preventing people from “kicking the can down the road”.

Deferit promotes responsible payment behaviour. In practice, 54% of Deferit users that join with an overdue bill will pay their next bill on time, evidence that Deferit is helping people get ahead of payments and practice financial responsibility.

While some utility companies do, many billers actually do not. Consider car registrations, childcare, and healthcare bills to name a few. These are some of the most popular bills on the platform. Most of these bills offer no payment flexibility, which is a holistic household problem. What's more, many of these billers are also small businesses themselves - Deferit helps both sides and ensures these businesses also get paid on time.

For electricity providers and other utility providers that offer payment plans. Whilst some offer the flexibility to consumers, moving payment dates may void pay on time discounts under the T&Cs of these plans. Contacting these providers is time consuming and usually results with lots of time spent on the phone. If you're a busy mum trying to juggle the kids among everything else, this isn't a great solution.

Deferit makes this process simple, convenient and easy to help more people pay bills. It's all online and in one place for any bill one may have.

Bill smoothing in electricity requires the customer to make forward payments against an estimate of usage - which often leads to a "true up" payment at a later point in time. Using Deferit allows people to pay their bill based on its actual usage and know the full final cost up front. We've heard from customers who have used smoothing solutions that they've had a negative experience when the "true up" occurs, often resulting in them needing to pay an unexpected difference that they haven’t budgeted for.

What’s more, customers on these programs still aren't able to easily move payments in a given month if a life event happens and are left without a solution to smooth those payments between their fortnightly pay cycles at times when they need it most.

Deferit doesn't create debt for the consumer - we only deal with bills that are non-discretionary in nature. The customer owes their biller the funds with or without us. If a consumer has a bill (such as an energy or water bill), it is a pre-existing obligation which has to be paid. As such, we are not a BNPL provider as consumers are unable to buy anything on our platform or create any new debts.

If a customer misses a payment to Deferit, the platform prevents any further bills from being uploaded until this is rectified. Our service cannot be used to “kick the can down the road” as the four fortnightly payments are due on a 14 day cycle.

Traditional finance providers are under no obligation to assess the suitability of the transactions the customer is entering into today, even when currently paying off balances accruing high interest charges. These products only assess suitability at the time of application (which can be years before) and not when entering into the transaction.

We assess the suitability of our users in relation to each specific bill they defer. We're on a mission to stop consumers falling into debt traps, paying interest, annual fees and late fees on such traditional products.

We're changing the way people pay and budget their bills over time.

To date we've saved customers over $8m from late fees and lost discounts from over $100m of bills that we've paid. Our customers are feeling less stressed and staying out of penalty pathways using our product, and this is based on underlying factual data. We're reinforcing positive budgeting behaviour and saving people money in the process. It's a long term solution to a problem that hasn't previously been solved.

We have just under 200,000 Australians on our platform. We have thousands of stellar reviews on Google, Facebook and across the app stores (iOS and Google). And we believe that we're just getting started.