Australian FinTech company profile #113 - Archa

1. Company Name: Archa

2. Website: archa.com.au

3. Key Staff & Titles:

Oliver Kidd, Founder and CEO

Fei-Fei Porter, CFO

Matthew Round, CRO

Morgan Pretty, CTO

4. Location(s): Melbourne, Victoria

5. In one sentence, what does your fintech do?:

Archa is a smarter credit card that makes business spending easier.

6. How / why did you start your fintech company?:

Credit cards haven’t evolved to meet the needs of modern businesses. The basic concept is simple: you spend, collect reward points, pay down the balance each month, or get charged high interest fees. Sure, there’s some perks, like travel insurance or lounge access. But keep in mind that these perks are often designed to make you feel like your business credit card is fundamentally important. We have a different view: we want to build a business credit card that adds real value to your business. We want to connect to your accounting to make things reconcile a bit easier, and issue cards instantly to help you and your team operate at maximum velocity for longer. On other cards there are high annual fees and long wait times on the customer support line – we’ve done away with these problems too.

We wanted to solve all of these problems. Rather than waiting in line at your bank branch or filling out loads of paperwork, we make it really simple for you to apply instantly through the Archa app. We’ll assess you in minutes, get you set up straight-away and issue a card on the spot. The best part of course, is there’s no personal guarantee, so you can have peace of mind.

It’s a big step forward for small business owners.

7. What is the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?:

We’ve raised a reasonable amount of capital along the way, having garnered the support of some fantastic investors. This has been a really rewarding part of building Archa. In the process, our Founder was nominated as Emerging Fintech Leader of the Year in the 2020 Finnies Awards, and we won the Hong Kong Australia Business Association Award for Start-up and Innovation. We were really pleased with both.

As for the best thing that we’ve learnt? Listen to your customers, they will provide all the answers. When we set out to solve the problems faced by businesses when using business credit cards, the first thing we did was speak to loads of business owners. Any size, any industry – it all helps. From there we were able to very clearly define the pain point we were setting out to solve.

8. What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?:

Listen to the community. Get online, reach out to potential customers and see what their pain points are. The problems are out there and the business community is vocal about them, it’s up to you to listen and provide a solution.

Make sure that you keep pounding the pavement (or the Zoom links) and having meetings. Meet as many people as possible and get their take on what you’re doing. You never know where your next investment is coming from, nor do you really ever know who will be critical to your business’s success long term. Take more meetings, do more talking. We found this to be invaluable advice when it was given to us.

9. What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?:

Right now, our top priority is to provide Australian businesses with a credit card solution that will enable them to manage and grow their business. We’re in beta right now, helping our first customers get more out of their business credit cards. Our beta program is in huge demand (very exciting!) so we plan to grow out to a larger group of beta customers. Sometime in the first half of next year we’ll open the flood gates so everyone can apply.

Everything after this is just a bonus.

10. What other fintechs or companies do you admire?:

We are big fans of Cake Equity, and FrankieOne. Making life easier for businesses is something we love, and those guys are doing a great job of making cap table management (Cake) and customer onboarding and fraud (Frankie) a lot easier for Australian businesses.

We are also very excited to see what Fast is doing in the online checkout space; anything that helps businesses transact faster is alright by us.

11. What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?:

Perhaps the most interesting thing that’s happened to us was pivoting from consumer neobanking to business credit cards. It was a huge decision to make such a material change while we were already a little way down the road, but ultimately it’s one we are so grateful we made.

In terms of funny moments – probably the most hilarious things internally are the stories of us trying to deal with banks (whether personally or in business). We have a relationship with a few business banks, and quite honestly (without naming names) the experiences are almost always tedious. From being told we can’t be helped because the branch closes in 45 minutes, to having our accounts frozen because someone forgot to ask for a signature, these awful experiences just make us want to move faster. It’s a pretty big opportunity, and every day we don’t solve it is another day that Australian business owners are waiting on hold.