Top Companies to watch out for in 2019

At Trade Finance Global we love talking to and watching companies grow. We identified 3 great companies to watch out for in 2019, looking at their growth, fantastic products and leadership journeys in the past 12 months.

Tradefinanceglobal.com editor James Sinclair, said: “We’re delighted to showcase 3 top companies and commend them for an excellent 2018, amidst volatility, uncertainty and competition, as well as earmark them for a stellar 2019. Well done to all of our winners.”

Mandeep Sodhi, CEO and founder of HashChing

HashChing (www.hashching.com.au) is Australia’s first online home loan marketplace connecting borrowers to community rated experienced mortgage brokers who are able to negotiate better home loan rates from 80+ lenders at no cost to borrowers. After Royal Commission, it was quite evident that banks were doing their best to rip off their loyal customers with a higher rate while offering a better rate to new customers. Borrowers have lost trust in banks and time-poor borrowers often seek assistance from mortgage brokers who can compare 1000+ loan products and recommend the right home loan best suited to borrowers’ needs. The problem is where do you find these independently rated mortgage brokers. HashChing is solving this issue by connecting borrower instantly to a mortgage broker based on their location, type of loan and even language preference. The instantly matched broker calls the borrower within few hours to setup a meeting at borrower’s place at a time convenient to borrower, even outside working hours and weekends. Borrower then rates the service of the mortgage broker who gets rewarded with more home loan enquiries from HashChing. HashChing also provides online portal to borrowers to manage their home loan application, provide documents to their broker, receive updates on the application, and assistance on conveyancing and insurance.

HashChing has collected over 4,000 reviews on its network of mortgage brokers using HashChing platform. On an average, each HashChing broker has access to over 34 lenders and an experience of 10.8 years in mortgage industry.

What was your top highlight of 2018?

The top highlight for HashChing was hitting $1 billion of home loan settlements through our platform in July 2018. We managed to hit the big billion number in under 3 years of our launch in August 2015. The $1 billion of settlement provided nearly $10 million of savings to borrowers by going through HashChing partner mortgage broker. We sent out an email to the borrowers if they would like to provide video testimonial on HashChing and our partner broker who helped them secure a better home loan rate. We were surprised to get hundreds of responses from borrowers willing to participate. We only managed to interview a few of them and uploaded to our YouTube channel which got shared around a lot. Listening to those testimonial videos gives me so much satisfaction and a sense of pride on what our team has built today. We are genuinely making impact to peoples’ lives by putting more money back in their pocket instead of banks.

What were the biggest challenges of 2018?

Biggest challenge for us in 2018 was staying lean as a small team and still deliver a lot to exceed our customers’ (mortgage brokers and borrowers) expectations. We are only a team of 11 people in Sydney and some team members offshore. Running a marketplace is even harder as you have two-sided customers with different needs and expectations. Building tech for both customers and continuously improving by regularly listening to their feedback with a limited team was a big challenge but we managed to deliver it all. The other challenge in the beginning of 2018 was maintaining high quality of mortgage brokers. We introduced a whole lot of variables such as response time to call borrower etc. in our proprietary algorithm that significantly improved the borrower experience on the platform. Our algorithm learns in real-time and does the matchmaking at a postcode level to reward the right behaviour of the partner mortgage broker expected on HashChing platform.

What are your biggest plans for 2019?

For 2019, our main focus is to completely streamline the end to end home loan journey for the borrower and make it stress free. One of the roadblocks to getting home loan is finding an experienced conveyancer or solicitor who can review the contract of sale and provide the right legal advice which is a very crucial step for the borrower. HashChing has now launched conveyancing service at a fixed price starting $995 including GST from experienced solicitors around Australia. Borrower is connected to our partner solicitor from our secure online dashboard who contacts the borrower within hours to provide the complete conveyancing service at a fixed price negotiated by HashChing. We are now looking at other services like home and contents insurance to make the whole journey of finding the right home loan to moving into your dream house hassle free, from one online portal only.

Finally, HashChing is not a mortgage broker but rather an online marketplace with technology at its core. We will be looking at automating a lot more processes with the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve the productivity of our partner mortgage brokers so they can focus on getting the right outcome for borrowers.

What’s your top prediction for 2019?

For mortgage industry in Australia, my prediction is that more borrowers will demand the service of experienced mortgage brokers as it’s getting harder to get a home loan from the bank directly with new credit policies and whole lot of information required by lenders. Royal Commission has also eroded trust of borrowers in big 4 banks so I think non-bank lenders will continue to grow their business through better rates and service with the help of mortgage brokers.

Leo Tyndall, CEO and Founder Marketlend

We deliver best-in-class marketplace lending solutions connecting investors and SMEs in ways never done before. We are committed to creating a business world where obstacles to financial transparency, fairness, high returns and efficiency are vanquished.

After decades of working in global legal and financial services firms on “the big end of town”, I realised SMEs needed help.

While large-scale investors and borrowers had any number of finance options available to them, the SME space was ignored and under-served. Those investors
who were interested in lending to smaller enterprises couldn’t break into the market, leaving these businesses with only banks and large financial institutions to turn to for funds.

Not only did these lenders demand their pound of flesh, but the need to secure capital bred long delays and miles of red tape that meant loans went unapproved for
months. Making things worse, new fintech lenders frequently charged hidden fees and prohibitively high interest rates that sapped SMEs cash flow through direct debits that cut too deep. There had to be a better way.

Marketlend’s first-of-its-kind marketplace lending platform is by design far more mature, fair, transparent and secure than any peer-to-peer lender. Robust legal structures, secure payment systems, and proprietary risk assessment predictability software gives qualified investors the assurances they need to invest confidently, while ensuring SMEs can keep their businesses running smoothly and competitively. Marketlend also has a secondary market called Loan Exchange where investors can readily liquidate their loans. All these structures are underpinned by Marketlend itself, which puts its own skin in the game by automatically investing with the investors —the first dollars of every loan is always Marketlend’s.

What was your top highlight of 2018?

What were your biggest challenges in 2018?

What are your biggest plans for 2019?

What’s your top prediction for 2019?

We are in a strong position for 2019. We’ve expanded the depth and breadth of our team, adding two former American Express executives, Karl Lauxmann and Adrian Jenkinson, who will be driving what we anticipate will be rapidly growing origination volumes. November saw $5.2 million in origination and we are looking to double that in the coming months.

We are also looking at the growth of the two exciting products we introduced at the end of 2018: UnLock and GreenLend. So watch this space. If you know of any businesses that can benefit from either, please let us know.

On the risk management side, 2019 will benefit from the additional measures we have put into place over 2018 and this should help ensure a solid performance from our book.

As far as the wider economy goes, clearly there are some stressors out there, especially in particular industries, and we will be continuing to diversify away from those challenging sectors while making sure that additional protections are in place for our underlying investors in all opportunities, including in those sectors.

Sidd Gandhi, Cofounder & CEO of KyePot

KyePot has brought a 100+ year old Indian ~ $500 Billion para banking group savings & lending chit fund concept of India online, as India’s 1st Digital Chits platform. This industry hasn’t changed much in 50+ years or so and has been suffering from lack of digitalisation, opaqueness, mismanagement, leekages and more so a bad perception of being a ponzi scheme, isnpite of being a lifeline of middle and low income India (known as Bharat). We’re offering users a transperent, safer and high yeilding investment and low interest loan via the group savings and borrowing Digita Chits for user to achieve their financial goals. A truly mobile neo banking alternative for India. Our aim is bring this entire shadow banking online and connect it to mainstream payments and banking networks.

What was your top highlight of 2018?

We established our direct to consumer proposition with an unique model, adhering with regulatory compliances as well as complete safeguard for end users funds. We collaborated with digital payment companies, banks and India stack and regulators to create this transformative proposition.

What were the biggest challenges in 2018?

Education, awareness and creating trust in KyePot as an alternate savings & borrowing brand was the main issue at the start but gradually the good customer service and customer 1^st approach, we saw users warming up to us and now we have huge demand and we’re building capabilities to service that demand

What are your biggest plans for 2019?

We’ve been building capabilities on infrastructure, operations and customer servicing which we’ll strengthen in a big way in 2019. We’ve got very ambitious plans to scale up and create the most trusted pan Indian digital chits offering.

What’s your top prediction for 2019?

Being an India national election year, and the ups and down around banking/NBFC liquidity issues of 2018 as well as Aadhaar e-kyc and e-sign issues, the worries for lending fintechs will not go away in 2019 so easily, Only the ones with access to balance sheet, customer service, robust collections & recovery will survive and scale. With more users getting used to digital payments and lending, digital savings and investments will become attractive to mainstream.

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