US lender enters Australian market

NYSE-listed OnDeck Capital, Inc is a platform for small business loans, and its entrance into the Australian lending market is its first venture outside North America.

OnDeck has partnered with MYOB 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.

The technology-enabled small business lender evaluates, approves and funds small business loans the same day. Headquartered in New York City, the company has originated more than US$2 billion in loans to small businesses in more than 700 industries across all 50 US states and Canada.

“Australia represents an exciting growth opportunity,” OnDeck CEO Noah Breslow said.

“Similar to the US market, in Australia we see a huge gap between small business financing needs and the availability of capital from traditional sources,” Mr Breslow said.

“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,” he said.

OnDeck aims to answer a key challenge facing Australian small businesses: the ability to access working capital quickly and easily, Mr Breslow said.

US small business owners have embraced the model, and the lender is confident that the platform 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, OnDeck Australia CEO Cameron Poolman said.

MYOB has closely followed OnDeck’s success in the US and is excited to bring its financing solutions not only to its customers but to the entire small business market in Australia, MYOB chief executive Tim Reed said.

“Our partnership with OnDeck is the latest step in our ongoing journey to making business life easier,” Mr Reed said.

“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.”

Mr Reed added that this is all underpinned by significant and successful R&D investments in cloud-based platforms.

OnDeck uses advanced lending technology and analytics to assess creditworthiness based on actual operating performance and not solely on the owner’s personal credit.

The lender’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.