(20 September 2017 – Australia) Australian fintech company Waddle has announced its expansion into New Zealand.
The firm, which provide invoice financing, says it grants businesses a real-time view of available funding, with an automatic drawdown of funds against unpaid invoices, facilitated by partnerships with accounting software, including Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks Online.
Waddle says it has funded over A$200 million in receivables in the last twelve months.
“We've had significant demand from New Zealand small to medium enterprises (SMEs), averaging one application per day, without any active marketing of the service,” said Leigh Dunsford, one of three co-founders at the fintech.
“As we have approved a number of NZ accounts, it is important for us to establish a presence as soon as possible to service demand,” he said.
Simon Creighton another co-founder, and a long-time friend of Dunsford said, “The current process has been done the same way for decades and no-one was building software to solve it. Our technology is world-class and is transforming the approach of other lending businesses and banks, by removing how manual and labour intensive the process is.
“The priority in building our product is to make it as simple as possible for SMEs to use, to allow them to spend less time liaising with finance companies and more time growing their business.
Dusnfored added, “We set out to disrupt a serious problem in the market, to reinvent a product historically plagued with negative perceptions.
“We are fixing the complexities and friction pain points SMEs and their advisors have with their existing product and opening up funding to businesses that have ordinarily shied away from or never considered options outside of traditional bank finance: over 70% of our customers have never used a receivables lending product before.”
“We haven’t created a new lending product altogether, rather built up a more efficient and effective way of funding businesses by automating every aspect of lending and borrowing,” he said.