Online SME lender Spotcap has celebrated its one-year anniversary in Australia by issuing more than $11 million of credit lines to micro, small and medium-sized businesses in Australia – with “substantial” growth through the third-party channel.
Since launching down under one year ago – Spotcap is headquartered in Berlin – the fintech lender has shown an average monthly growth rate of 30%.
Interestingly, more than half (58%) of its small business clients are over five years old. Managing director of Spotcap Australia, Lachlan Heussler, said this is indicative of the gap fintechs are filling in the Australian financial sector.
“That shows to us that well-established small businesses still have massive pent up demand for credit, which has not been met by traditional banking and financial relationships,” he told Australian Broker.
“Businesses like ours are really filling a gap in the market that is really being demanded by small business owners.”
Heussler also told Australian Broker that growth through the broker channel over the past year has been “substantial”.
“Our partner share of growth has grown enormously, especially in the last five months. We are seeing an increased willingness for brokers to embrace online SME lending and fintech sector in general.
“Brokers are beginning to understand that our products basically make their job easier. In the past it has been difficult for brokers to obtain small business finance for their clients because of the cumbersome paper-based, time consuming application processes.”
Over the coming year, Heussler said Spotcap will be actively targeting further growth through the third-party channel.
“We have aligned ourselves with a couple of aggregators. We can’t announce these yet, but those deals are done. We are doing a soft launch before we formally announce them. These will give us access to thousands of brokers across Australia,” he told Australian Broker.
“We are also actively engaged with the industry associations. It has been really good that the industry associations understand the challenges that the broking industry will face over time and that they have been quite supportive of the next generation fintech lenders.”
