Is my bank information safe?
The bank connection is read-only. Your online banking credentials go to a specialist verification provider, not to us, and a read-only link cannot move money.
Verifying your income is the part of the application people hesitate over, and the hesitation is reasonable. Here is exactly what happens.
The connection is read-only
When you verify your banking, the connection is established by a specialist bank-verification provider, inside their own secure window. You enter your online banking credentials there; they are not shown to us, and we do not store them. Nobody at INSTANT.CREDIT ever sees your online banking password.
What comes back to us is a read-only view: the account holder’s name, the account details needed to send and collect payment, and a history of transactions. Read-only means what it says — the connection can look, and it cannot move money. It cannot make a payment, initiate a transfer, or change anything about your account.
What we actually look at
Less than people expect. The assessment is narrow:
- That the account belongs to you
- That income arrives, and on what schedule
- How much lands after deductions, which sets the 50%-of-net-pay ceiling
- Whether payments have been returned recently
- What other short-term credit is already being repaid out of the account
We are not reading your life story out of your grocery spending. We are answering one question: does the repayment fit in the pay period it falls in?
Taking payment is a separate authorisation
The read-only connection does not give us the ability to debit you. Collecting the repayment on the due date happens through a pre-authorised debit that you authorise separately, in the loan agreement, for a stated amount on a stated date. You will have seen both figures before you signed.
If you cancel the loan within the two business days the Act gives you, no debit should be taken. If one is, tell us at once and we will return it.
How to keep yourself safe
The technology is rarely the weak point. Impersonation is.
- We will never ask for your online banking password by phone, email or text. Nobody legitimate will. If someone claiming to be from INSTANT.CREDIT asks, hang up and call the number published on this site.
- We will never ask you to send money to release a loan. Advance-fee demands — a “release fee”, an “insurance deposit”, a first payment before funding — are a scam every single time. Ontario caps the total cost of borrowing at $14 per $100 and it is collected with the repayment, never before it.
- Check the address on the email. Anything asking you to log in through a link is worth verifying independently before you click it.
Your data afterwards
What we hold, why we hold it and how long it stays is set out in our privacy policy, and you have the right under Canadian privacy law to ask what we have about you and to have errors corrected. If you would rather not connect an account at all, contact us before you apply and we will tell you what alternative verification we can accept — it is slower, and sometimes it is the right trade.
