Hitachi slashes rate for smaller personal loans

Hitachi has jumped up the best buy tables with a new low rate for those looking to borrow smaller amounts.

Hitachi has lowered the interest rate to 6.2% on loans of between £5,000 and £7,999.

Taking out £5,000, for example, would cost you £5,803.80 in total if paid back over five years with a monthly payment of £96.73.

Best-buy personal loan

The personal loan market has been extremely competitive this year, but most of the action has been focused on larger loans of between £7,500 and £15,000.

Hitachi's new rate is only beaten by the peer-to-peer lender Zopa, which is offering a rate of 5.7%.

Peer-to-peer lenders work in a slightly different way by cutting out the middleman – the bank – to make rates cheaper for borrowers and lenders. For more read What is peer-to-peer (P2P) lending?

The next best rate is 6.4% and is offered by Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, Sainsbury's Bank and Tesco Bank as you can see from the table below.

Interest rates

When applying for a personal loan the headline rate may not be the one you’re offered. This is because lenders are only required to offer this rate to 51% of successful applicants. It’s all dependent on your own financial situation.

One way to suss out the likelihood of getting accepted for a loan is to check your credit score before applying. Thanks to lovemoney.com you can benefit from a 30-day free trial with CreditExpert which will give you an idea of how likely it is that you'll get the loan at the advertised rate.

Compare personal loans with lovemoney.com

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