Startup founders say crowdfunding delays are an ‘extreme embarrassment’
Startup founders have hit out at the Labor Party for its refusal to support the passage of a long-awaited crowd sourced equity funding (CSEF) bill, resulting in the legislation being pushed back until February at the earliest. The move from Labor, which was led by digital economy spokesman Ed Husic, comes a week after the bill was introduced to Parliament for a second time, having already been knocked back in December 2015. The new bill, if eventually passed, means unlisted public companies with less than $25 million in assets and turnover would be able to raise capital via crowd-sourced equity funding. A spokesperson for Treasurer Scott Morrison told Fairfax Media […]
ANZ Strikes Again: After Apple Pay comes BladePay
The ANZ Bank, fresh from establishing itself as a satisfied customer of Apple for its Apple Pay digital wallet system for consumers, has now launched BladePay, an Android-based mobile payments solution for Australian businesses. It describes BladePay as a handheld payment device which is capable of running third-party applications and uses the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system. It features a 5-inch display, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, along with a 1/2D barcode scanner. Wi-Fi and 4G are available as connectivity options. “We are routinely told that managing payments is one of the biggest pain points for business owners, yet when we looked at the market we […]
Media mogul-backed bank challenger close to breaking even
SocietyOne, a peer-to-peer lender that is partly owned by Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Stokes and James Packer’s companies, expects to start making profits within the next 12 to 18 months. The start-up lender has in recent years been heavily investing in marketing, technology and new staff as it seeks to establish peer-to-peer lending on Australia’s financial landscape, pinching some of the profits banks make from the $100 billion personal credit market. After a year of rapid loan growth, chief executive Jason Yetton said the lender now faced the prospect of breaking even, though this would depend on how much it invested. “We think it can reach profitability over the next 12 […]
Mortgage Choice joins forces with leading online lender Prospa
In a bid to better cater to the growing commercial needs of its customers, Mortgage Choice has added Australia’s leading online lender, Prospa, to its panel. “We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with Prospa to help us deliver a broader range of commercial lending and cash flow financing solutions to our customers,” said Mortgage Choice’s general manager of product Emma Dupont-Brown (pictured above with Prospa’s Matt Bauld). “Prospa is the leader in online small business lending, utilising their smart proprietary technology platform to quickly assess online applications for unsecured loans up to $250,000. “A significant proportion of our customers are small business owners who have very specific commercial […]
Data deluge as fintech wave builds
Fintech is here and is going to grow quickly, so businesses need to get up to speed. Those who thought the internet had done all it could to disrupt business need to think again, because a new wave of disruption is about to break as the fintech revolution gathers pace. A new word for some people, fintech (or financial technology) has made it into the Oxford Dictionary. Defined as ‘technologies that support banking’, the word itself may not be in common use, but there’s no doubt everyone is already affected by it in some way. More important than what has happened in the early years of fintech, which has its […]
Banks pay lip service to fintech collaboration
Banks need to become “platforms” that deliver financial services alongside various start-up partners, but many banks are paying lip service to collaboration and remain reluctant to engage with the local fintech ecosystem, according to Alex Scandurra, chief executive of fintech hub Stone & Chalk. The notion that a bank can merely innovate internally “is such outdated thinking,” he told the 1300 delegates to the Reimagination’16 summit in Sydney on Thursday. Banks needed to shift from thinking they sell a mortgage, deposit or loan to being “a platform of services [that] deliver a whole range of things to customers, some of which are built and delivered by [the bank], some of […]
Apple Pay helps banks sell mortgages and deposits, ANZ Bank says
ANZ Bank chief Shayne Elliott insists his move to break ranks with rivals and do a deal with Apple to allow easy payments on the iPhone is helping the lender sell a wide range of financial products, even mortgages. A day after his key rivals suffered a major setback in their brawl with Apple, Mr Elliott on Wednesday stood by ANZ’s move to work with the US technology giant, which is moving into the bank-dominated payments market. Westpac, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank want to launch a collective boycott of Apple Pay, which requires banks to surrender revenue in order to access the iPhone’s chip […]
StartupAUS’s Crossroads report reveals 14-point plan to transform economy
Two-and-a-half years ago, StartupAUS declared that Australia was at a crossroads. We released our first report, bearing the Crossroads name, and called for a future that embraced technology start-ups and innovation. Today we released the third report in that series. You can find it online at www.startupaus.org/crossroads/. The question in 2016 isn’t which path to go down, but how far and how fast we are prepared to travel. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen encouraging progress across all areas of the nation’s start-up ecosystem. Right from inception, start-ups are better equipped to find a home. Hubs for specific start-ups such as SproutX (agtech) and Stone and Chalk (fintech) have […]
