A B.C. payday loan company has stopped offering payday loans and converted all its stores to its instalment loans affiliate after agreeing to refund $547,000 to more than 2,800 borrowers following a Consumer Protection BC investigation. 

Cash Money, a leading national retailer of payday loans, was found to have violated laws in an investigation that followed a random inspection of a store in August 2024. The investigation found that Cash Money asked for re-payments from borrowers on a shorter timeline than required by law, sometimes before the borrower’s next payday. 

Cash Money entered an agreement with Consumer Protection BC to correct their contracts, and also mailed refund cheques to the borrowers for the non-compliant loans that occurred between June 2023 and July 2025. 

Since that mid-September announcement, Cash Money has since converted its retail locations in British Columbia to storefronts for its Lend Direct affiliate, which offers installment loans, but not payday loans. Both Cash Money and Lend Direct are owned by Curo Holdings Group, which went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in 2024 in the United States. 

Cash Money locations in Alberta were similarly rebranded as Lend Direct when that province lowered maximum lending rates on payday loans. Changes in national laws lowered the maximum cost of a payday loan to $14 per $100 borrowed, effective January 1, 2025. 

The Consumer Protection BC release announcing the financial penalty included some other data that indicate how consumers use payday loans. British Columbia also has an open data policy that includes statistical summaries of the industry. 

Payday loans are, according to the data, not used occasionally by consumers who encounter hardship, as the industry often contends. The B.C. statistics, (and similar data in other provinces) show that the average customer takes out nearly five loans, with a total value of about $3,000 each year. Only about 25 per cent of borrowers have a single loan in a year. 

Those figures may also be misleading because they are based on aggregated data provided by lenders. A single borrower may use the services of multiple lenders, meaning the number of borrowers is overstated, and the repeat use understated. The average cost of borrowing is almost exactly the maximum legal limit, indicating there is no price competition in the industry.