Jessica Ellerm is a thought leader specializing in Small Business and the Gig Economy and is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zuper, a neowealth disruptor in Australia

If all things go to plan, Australia will soon have a new SME neobank pitching its services to Australia’s small business community – Avenue.

Avenue’s aim is to provide businesses with turnover of between AU$500,000 and AU$2,000,000 access to instant credit, using data to more accurately assess risk and cash flow.

The aspiring bank’s founders have real chops in the SME space, having founded one of Australia’s most prominent and home-grown disruptors in the credit reporting sector – CreditorWatch.

Founded in 2010 by Colin Porter, CreditorWatch paved the way for SMEs to gain better access to credit management tools, aggregating data from multiple sources, even allowing SMEs to lodge debtor defaults through the platform, which could then be used by other creditors within the ecosystem.

Any successful SME bank needs to be built on a deep understanding of credit and an ability to automate decision making as much as possible, especially as margins compress, and cash flow gets murky, due to COVID stimulus payments. The heat will be on for the founding team to show all of the above is possible, not to mention come up with a killer (and affordable) distribution model.

That’s what makes Avenue a very interesting business to follow. If the bank can leverage its founder’s CreditorWatch history and relationships, surely a more seamless path to market hasn’t been seen from both a data and distribution perspective.

The company is currently reported to be raising funds for its Series B round, and expects to have its restricted licence this year, followed by a market launch next year.

New readers can see 3 free articles before getting the Daily Fintech paywall. After that you will need to become a member for just US$143 a year (= $0.39 per day) and get all our fresh content and our archives and participate in our forum.