Wonga boss ahead of MP questioning: “We're not perfect, but 99% of customers happy”

The Wonga film premiered last night, which was the cue for Wonga COO Niall Wass to tell news organisations what he feels about the short-term loan service – just ahead of Wonga having to appear in front of MPs in a questioning session into payday lender regulation today.

Wass told Newsnight that 99% of Wonga’s one million customers were content with Wonga’s lending terms.

But he also told ITV News: “I am not sitting here today saying that everything we do is perfect; what we are trying to do is use great technology to give a really fair, transparent service to customers.”

He defended making the Wonga film, 12 Portraits, to Sky News, saying: “We felt the need to release it because we felt that the voice of the customer, really the silent majority of people using our service, was not being heard.

“Generally you hear a lot of criticism about our service out in the media and actually the super-positive stories that we see every day from our customer feedback are not being heard, so we wanted to redress that balance and allow their voice to come out.

“We didn’t think it was fair the characterisation of some of our customers, so we want people to reconsider, judge for themselves have a look at our site have a look at those videos and see what you think.”

Wonga will join Mr Lender and QuickQuid in front of MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee into regulation of the payday lender market later today.

Business practices of payday lenders are also being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Competition Committee.