Quick Loans Obtains QuickQuid

Quick Loans can today announce that it has successfully obtained the trading name QuickQuid.co.uk. The name will now become part of the “Quick” stable of brand names owned by Quick Loans Ltd.

The name QuickQuid.co.uk is important for us because it has caused, and continues to cause confusion for its customers. Many of our customers believe that QuickLoans.co.uk closed down in 2019.

Quick Quid were previously a Short Term lender based in the United Kingdom. They were the second largest provider of what people often call “payday loans”, loans under £1000 with a duration of less than 12 months.

In 2019 they entered into administration, that administration process is still ongoing and likely to end within the next 6 months.  QQ had issues with complaints from previous customers who went on what we call “compensation rampages”. Egged on by Claim Management Companies, they would try to blackmail Quick Quid into refunds or face being fines from the FOS (Financial Ombudsman Service) per claim. Lenders have two choices, defend themselves from a £300 - £500 compensation request, but in doing so they would instantly get a £650 fine just for the complaint being lodged, or just settling and paying out that £300-£500. Not surprisingly, this eventually led to their collapse and the rest is almost history.

Most people will remember them for their advert where the mother is telling her child that he would need to smell today because the boiler is on broken, but she'll get it fixed tomorrow with money from a loan. 

To obtain the trading name, we needed to show that there was genuine confusion, fortunately/unfortunately we were able to show this without any grounds for doubt. In our view, nobody else would have been able to show this confusion and would not have been successful if they started the same action using the same process.

The evidence for confusion came in several parts.

We could show a clear and verifiable history of complaints being filed with the FOS against Quick Loans from people who were clearly saying their loan was with Quick Quid.

From 2014 - 2019, we would receive around 10-15 emails a month telling us that we had mis-sold the customer a loan with Quick Quid clearly named on the claim form.

Then in 2019 when QQ first went under, we were receiving 50-60 a week from the Financial Ombudsman Service. It was beyond bearable, we had to turn off our phones and even had to reject the mail coming into our office.

We could show letters and emails from customers and the FOS, this was 100% proof of customer confusion that could be verified. Many don’t know, but for every FOS email that we didn’t respond to, we would also be fined £650 – we had to respond to every single one of them and the administration costs behind this were significant. There is an email (see below) from us to the FOS pleading with them to check customer’s claims before sending them on to us.

Even today we still get around 5-6 emails a month that should have gone to Quick Quid. One just last week was from a fraud investigator on behalf of a local authority. If fraud investigators are getting confused, we can understand why the average customer would be too.

We could show how QQ’s £1m a month TV campaign was also resulting in increased visitors to our site. Whilst it may seem counter intuitive to try and complain about a positive, all we had to show was evidence of confusion. What’s more confusing them QQ showing ads and Quick Loans receiving the customers?

We could show this in the fact that when QQ stopped advertising, our traffic also declined substantially.

A number of our customers do get confused and try to reach us by visiting QuickQuid.co.uk. Unfortunately, when they see that the page doesn’t resolve for a prolonged period of time, they believe that we have gone out of business too. Customers believing that we had also closed has had and continued to have a detrimental effect on our business.

The name for us is dead and it won’t be revived. We were genuine when we say it causes confusion for our customers. The last thing we wanted for it was to end up in the hands of people who were up to no good and would cause us reputational harm. Our biggest fear has now been put to bed.

For us, the QQ brand is now closed, will remain offline. We will continue to develop and promote our QuickLoans brand well into the future.