OnDeck Capital, Inc., a leading platform for small business loans, announced yesterday its expansion into the Australian market, introducing its disruptive online lending solution to Australia’s over two million small businesses.
Australia is OnDeck’s first market outside North America. In expanding to Australia, OnDeck has partnered with MYOB – Australia’s leading business accounting software provider – and a group of prominent Australian technology investors including Andrew Bassat and Jason Lenga (Seek), Gavin Solsky (Healthshare) and Cameron Poolman (Graysonline). Mr. Poolman will be CEO of OnDeck’s Australian business.
As part of the arrangements, MYOB will provide valuable local expertise and make the OnDeck solution available to its approximately one million business users across Australia.
OnDeck is a technology-enabled small business lender that can evaluate, approve and fund small business loans as fast as the same day. Headquartered in New York City, the company has originated more than $2 billion (USD) in loans to small businesses in more than 700 industries across all 50 U.S. states and Canada.
OnDeck uses advanced lending technology and analytics to assess creditworthiness based on actual operating performance and not solely on the owner’s personal credit. OnDeck’s proprietary small business credit scoring system, the OnDeck Score®, utilises more than 100 external data sources and 2,000 data points per loan application and leverages a database of more than 10 million small businesses.
OnDeck CEO Noah Breslow said, “Australia represents an exciting growth opportunity. Similar to the U.S. market, in Australia we see a huge gap between small business financing needs and the availability of capital from traditional sources. There is significant unmet small business lending demand in Australia, and we believe our online platform is well suited to address the capital needs of Australian small businesses.”
The OnDeck solution aims to answer a key challenge facing Australian small businesses: the ability to access working capital quickly and easily.
“U.S. small business owners have embraced the OnDeck model. We think OnDeck will prove to be the game-changer Australia needs to give its hard working small business community a resource to help owners reach their full business potential,” Mr. Poolman said.
MYOB CEO Tim Reed said, “We have closely followed OnDeck’s success in the U.S. and are excited to bring their financing solutions not only to our customers but to the entire small business market in Australia. Our partnership with OnDeck is the latest step in our ongoing journey to making business life easier. Building on our successful cloud based solutions, and partnering directly with other pioneering organisations such as OnDeck, we will ensure tight integration with MYOB products such that we offer a truly connected service. This is all underpinned by significant and successful R&D investments in cloud based platforms.”