Furthering the Lending Landscape – Finnies 24
Awards Sponsored by
We are thrilled to introduce this year’s finalists for the prestigious “Excellence in Consumer Lending” Finnies award. An advocate for a more inclusive financial future, Envestnet | Yodlee believes in empowering individuals through greater access to innovative financial solutions. We strive to create these opportunities through our commitment to open banking connections, alternative data, and intelligent financial experiences.
We are proud to sponsor the “Excellence in Consumer Lending” category for the Finnies, as we recognize the outstanding achievements of other companies with a similar vision. The finalists for this prestigious award, highlighted below have demonstrated exceptional innovation and dedication to advancing consumer lending practices. We applaud their efforts and extend our warmest congratulations and best of luck!
Jamie Twiss, Chief Executive Officer
From Jamie Twiss, more than just a financial services provider Beforepay is a champion of ethical lending. As the leading Australian FinTech dedicated to an ethical lending process, we transform borrowing into a customer-friendly, accessible experience.
Our core offering is our flagship wage advance product, which eliminates the burden of compound interest or hidden charges. Leveraging advanced AI and machine learning, our models analyse over 50,000 financial and behavioural variables to provide rapid, accurate lending decisions, ensuring loans are both affordable and within the customers' means. This values-driven approach enables us to set personalised limits, build repayment schedules based on paycycle forecasting, and help minimise customer risk to ensure that borrowing does not exacerbate financial pressures.
Our mission extends beyond offering financial products to disrupting predatory lending practices and promoting financial well-being for all our customers. By harnessing advanced AI and machine learning technologies, we deliver personalised and fair financial solutions, setting a new benchmark in the industry. Our commitment to transparent, customer-centric practices ensures that every loan we provide supports the financial stability and growth of our customers, reinforcing our role as a trusted and innovative leader in ethical lending.
James Coombes, Head of Business, Block Earner
From James Coombes, the consumer lending industry excels at helping the economy by injecting capital through responsible lending practices. However, there’s significant room for improvement. Consumer lending could be enhanced by offering more efficient, flexible, and accessible loans. In addition, tradition lenders continue to overlook non-traditional assets like cryptocurrency, limiting the options for a growing segment of Australians. Block Earner’s crypto-backed loans aim to solve these shortcomings.
By providing frictionless access to crypto-backed loans, we’re unlocking massive financial opportunities for millions of Australians. We are proud to be leading the way in this field of innovation, as we enhance risk management, transparency, and personalized lending solutions to improve the consumer lending industry.
We’re transforming the lending landscape with Crypto-Backed AUD loans, an innovative approach that allows users to use their cryptocurrency holdings as security for AUD loans. This brand-new financial solution – a first in Australia – bridges the gap between traditional finance and digital currency. By offering flexible loan terms, rapid approvals, and robust risk management, we address the specific needs of modern borrowers, thereby expanding financial inclusion and accessibility.
By integrating a full suite of financial services into a single, user-friendly platform, Block Earner is making money borderless, frictionless, and accessible to all.
Phil O’Connor, Head of Marketing, CarClarity
From Phil O’Connor, at its heart, CarClarity is a brokerage founded on human relationships. We believe that a responsible FinTech has to remember that every customer is a real person. We also believe that a good FinTech leverages technology to the extent that it can facilitate better customer relationships, rather than using it as a crutch to cut corners. That’s why CarClarity talks to every customer that comes through the funnel, whether they’re buying a second-hand clunker or a yacht. Every customer gets the same attention to detail and dedication to service.
As a general principle, every one of our customers is assessed individually and applications are prepared to suit that specific customer and their specific needs, in our dedicated scenario planning environment, our brokerage team kicks around individual customer problems and how we might go about addressing them. Automated communications make use of deep content personalization and flow logic to specifically address the customer’s needs at every discrete stage of their lending journey, letting them know what, if anything, is required to progress and what to expect next. The result is a hassle free and smarter car buying experience.
Through our strategic partnerships, CarClarity is the asset finance provider of choice for thousands of finance industry professionals across Australia. We feel the true power of FinTech is helping customers make informed decisions faster and easier, secure in the understanding that they’ve received a personalized service tailored for their specific needs.
William Brown, Co-Founder, Driva
From William Brown, Driva is furthering the lending landscape by providing consumers across the credit spectrum accurate rates and top customer service, in a highly scalable and automated way. Our technology automates the assessment of loan applications for 50+ lending options. This not only saves time, but also ensures accuracy and consistency in the loan assessment process, resulting in every customer receiving personalised rates based on their profile and obtaining the best deal possible.
Every customer who uses our platform has the ability to receive a personalised rate based on their profile and a choice of their preferred lender with 100% rate and fee transparency. We also compare the application against 1,000+ lender policies before being shared with a lender to protect the customer’s credit score. The loan application process is completed online, providing a seamless and hassle-free experience.
Despite Driva being a highly automated product, we acknowledge the value of human interactions during the loan application process. We have ensured our customer facing teams are involved in all key high value interactions with our customers to enable a personal touch. Our positive reviews on Google and Trustpilot are a testament to the priority we place on providing an exceptional customer experience that caters to the lending experience of every individual and meets their unique needs.
Jonathan Wu, Chief Product and Operations Officer
From Jonathan Wu, MONEYME is a B Corp certified digital lender that challenges the traditional ways of credit and simplifies the borrowing experience with products that meet the needs of modern consumers.
MONEYME’s competitive edge is based on customer-centric innovation and includes:
Award-winning car loans, personal loans, and credit cards that offer seamless digital experiences and industry-first features.
Proprietary technology that enables 24/7 application processing and loan decisioning and settlement in minutes.
A hard-to-replicate technology advantage with over 475,000 developer hours invested to date.
A diversified product portfolio, a broad customer base, and versatile distribution channels.
One of few ASX-listed B Corps with a strong sustainability focus and a commitment to having a positive impact.
In just 3 years from launching its digital car loan product, Autopay, it has quickly grown into the lender’s biggest opportunity. Autopay has been a key driver to MONEYME’s growth in recent years, and currently makes up more than 45% of its loan book. With major incumbents exciting the car loan market, MONEYME sees a significant opportunity to leverage the unrivaled speed and customer experience of Autopay to grow in this space.
MONEYME’s long term focus is to lead the future credit experience with innovation and a genuine care for people and the planet.
Leann Jones, Chief Executive Officer, Nimo
From Leann Jones, Nimo provides a turnkey, white label digital lending SaaS platform that enables to banks, lenders and brokers to seamlessly service their customers with straight-through loan processing, from origination through settlements to loan management.
Key ingredients of our secret sauce include:
• A proprietary platform built from the ground up to ensure it is compliant and specifically designed for financial services and optimized for “real” people
• A platform that's customisable, connects different parts of the lending process, and is ready to use on Day 1. It makes sure everyone involved—lenders, customers, and brokers—can work together on the same application, making applications 'right first time' and speeds up the decision-making process.
• A broad array of integrations with best-in-breed digital solutions to deliver a completely frictionless, end-to-end customer experience.
Nimo integrates disparate consumer lending components to create a comprehensive, streamlined process that makes borrowing easier and more efficient for consumers, and that’s where we excel. We push digital lending boundaries of “what’s possible”, and in turn, raise the bar and influence consumer expectations into the future.
Imogen Baxter, Chief of Staff, OwnHome
From Juzy Zhu, at OwnHome, we’re excited to offer a unique, first-in-market approach to consumer lending, helping aspiring homeowners buy their home without needing a deposit. We understand that with the skyrocketing house prices in Australia, saving up a standard 20% deposit plus stamp duty can feel overwhelming, even for those who are financially stable and ready to take on a mortgage. Traditional low deposit options usually come with a single loan at a higher interest rate and often require additional Lender’s Mortgage Insurance (LMI).
OwnHome is different in three key ways:
• A split loan structure: We provide a loan for the 20% deposit, which can then be paired with an existing 80% LVR loan. This means you can pay down the high-interest portion of the loan faster, reducing the total interest you pay over time. Plus, you’ll build equity in your home and reach an 80% LVR faster.
• No Lender’s Mortgage Insurance: Our Low Deposit Premium is competitively priced compared to most LMI options, especially at higher LVRs.
• Professional homebuying services: Unlike LMI and other risk-fee low deposit options, our Low Deposit Premium includes a free Buyer’s Agent Service and covers building and pest reports. We handle the trickiest parts of home buying, ensuring you get a great home at a fair price.
Our human-first approach to customer lending, combined with our Buyer’s Agent Service, helps our customers purchase a wonderful home in just six weeks on average. We believe home ownership should be within everyone’s reach, and we’re here to make that happen for you.
Rama Raju, Director and CEO, Pennant Technologies
From Rama Raju, our business is fundamentally premised on taking a ´platform business model´ to lending - treating the end-to-end value chain to be purely pivoted on customer/borrower lifecycle needs centricity. These lifecycle moments of truth are all-encompassing and not restricted to prevalent market focus (or should we say obsession) on loan origination metrics alone.
Pennant Technologies have ingrained our products and solutions with dynamic workflow/repayment schedule/hardship; delinquency management configurability to ensure that this platform-mindset to the lending value chain is brought to life, agnostic of lending product-line archetypes. Our platform leverages the unique concept of functional factories and business process driven execution engines. This enables lego-blocks-like functionality for banks and financial institutions to define, deploy and manage the business processes without having to rely on legacy core banking.
35+ Financial Institutions for their all kinds of Loans (Mortgages, Personal Loans (Secured and Unsecured), Business Loans, Commercial Loans and Asset Finance) use our comprehensive platform for an End – to – End lending value chain to originate and beyond origination to serve borrower’s lifecycle moments of truth, whilst improving cost efficiencies and making Core Banking resource light.
These institutions “Put Business Value First”, to address the key challenges faced in Core Banking Platforms, which impacts the consumer experience by extending the lending value chain:
Innovate, adapt and execute. Swiftly launch innovative loan offers, aligned to the personalized needs of the end customers
Accelerate loan portfolio growth. Scale at the speed of their business. One of our clients experiences a 23X loan portfolio growth
Boost operational efficiency. Streamline and transform operations for agility and adaptability
James Goodwin, Chief Growth Officer, Wisr
From James Goodwin, at Wisr, our mission is our competitive advantage. Our focus is on improving the financial health of Australians, helping them not only access credit to achieve their life goals, but also to pay that debt off sooner. Developing long-term relationships with customers allows us to collate valuable insights, which are then used to improve and add to our product suite, tailored to our customers’ growing needs and wants.
Our focus on financial wellness goes beyond lending, with solutions like our BreachAlert, which scours the internet daily for data breaches, so people can be notified if their email or other data have been involved in a historical breach. Monitoring breaches is incredibly important, and even more so for those with higher credit scores, with those users seeing on average higher instances of their data being involved with data breaches.
We take our role as an enabler of financial understanding and skill seriously. We’ve reinvented the consumer credit experience by looking at the bigger picture and improving a customer's holistic financial health, helping them make smart money decisions every day. Loan customers who engage with our proprietary Wisr platform are, on average, 13% further ahead on their loan repayments compared to those who don’t engage. With a customer Net Promotor Score of +78, we’re building a community of engaged Australians all seeking to better their financial well-being, one step at a time.
Envestnet | Yodlee does not offer any loan products or make any lending decisions. The funding and administration of all loans is undertaken by separate and unaffiliated financial institutions. This material should not be construed as a recommendation or endorsement of any particular product, service, bank or firm. Envestnet Yodlee was not involved in the evaluation or selection of any award nominees or winners.
