Peer-to-peer business lending platform, ThinCats Australia, has streamlined the assessment process with the launch of a new credit assessment tool.
Created by local company Othera, the credit assessment tool allows small companies to pre-qualify for loans on the ThinCats platform, as well as allowing its 300 peer-to-peer lenders make more informed business lending decisions.
According to John Pellew, CEO and founder of Othera, the typical pre-qualification process takes lenders anywhere from two to four hours.
“What makes Othera’s credit assessment tool unique and invaluable to lenders and borrowers is that the complex pre-qualification process has been automated with credit decisioning algorithms yet borrowers require no financial expertise to begin the online process.”
Using the platform will take less than five minutes to fill in the online form to pre-qualify for loans, with no requirements to upload documents, Pellew said. The Credit Assessment report is delivered to the lender within minutes.
The CEO of ThinCats Australia, Sunil Aranha, said the P2P platform is targeting $20 million in loans to businesses this year and the tool should accelerate its growth through a better matching process.
“The tool will attract more lenders to our platform as it improves the quality of information they base their lending decisions upon. This will make the process of lending more efficient on both sides of the transaction, which is a significant boost to small businesses in Australia,” he said.
ThinCats’ lenders will also benefit by being able to assess a borrower’s credit quality in a shorter time through Othera’s ability to directly access the potential borrower’s accounts, according to Pellew.
“Rather than relying on official credit rating reports and previous financial year’s tax returns which use historical data, lenders now have access to a Credit Assessment report that is generated from real-time accounting data,” he said.
ThinCats has funded 24 loans worth more than $3.1 million to date, at interest rates ranging from 11.5% to 15%.
