Over the last two years, we’ve introduced you to over 25 Australian fintech startups with the help of the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) in New York. Austrade brings seven market-ready fintech innovators in-person, to scale their businesses in the US. “Seven of the best and brightest Australian Fintech scaleups will be showcased in New York in October,” remarked Rachel Howard, Trade and Investment Commissioner New York. “These companies will participate in an intensive program that will connect them to the dynamic New York fintech scene and help them grow their businesses in the US.”
Despite global economic headwinds, Australia’s GDP is expected to be 3.25% in 2022. The financial services sector has consistently grown 9% per year since the start of the century. The tech sector has fostered a rapid transition to a service-based economy and the country is now home to over 700 fintech companies. The sector has been propelled by a regulatory environment that supports innovation with market-leading advances in digital payments, integrated wallets, open banking, and embedded finance. Block’s (formerly Square) $29B acquisition of the ‘buy now pay later’ solution Afterpay is just an early success story for this fertile fintech ecosystem, the sixth largest in the world and second in the Asia-Pacific region.
Austrade is working with a number of the leading Australian fintech companies to showcase the innovation coming out of this burgeoning market on a global stage. Partnered with WEVE Acceleration, the agency hosted seven disruptive fintechs that are tackling challenges to streamline automation, identity verification, payments, risk management, and digital transformation with vetted, market-ready solutions. Partnered with WEVE Acceleration
Here is an exclusive look at these leading companies:
Apxium Technologies
Founded by Jeremy Coombe in 2013 in Adelaide, Apxium Technologies is a platform for accounting firms that automates account receivables management. The company’s core solution, Apxium Connect, modernizes the entire debtor management process, handling client communications, payments, reconciliation, and reporting. In addition, Apxium offers integrated debt management solutions that allow firms to get invoices paid upfront while offering flexible installment options for their clients. The SaaS platform is available for a nominal monthly fee + low individual transaction fees; there are no setup fees or upfront costs.
Birchal
Founded by Matthew Vitale in 2018 in Sydney, Birchal is an equity crowdfunding platform that is exclusively focused on consumer brands. Founded right after Australia’s Securities and Investments Commission amended its legislative framework to allow for crowd-sourced funding, Birchal allows early-stage businesses to expand their access to capital inflows while providing investors with access to discover new opportunities in emerging brands and gain exposure in growing asset classes. By leveraging the Birchal platform, companies that are raising funding can seamlessly build fully compliant crowdsourcing campaigns for a fraction of the cost of other offerings. The platform has helped over 125 companies raise over A$95M since its founding and is responsible for approximately 70% of all successful crowdsourced funding campaigns in Australia.
Decisively
Founded by Courtenay Hollis in 2020 in Canberra, Decisively provides a SaaS platform that empowers organizations to perform millions of automated decisions and advice that complies with their policies and industry-specific regulations, every day, in real-time. Decisively simplifies the human experience across an evolving regulatory landscape using a no-code decision-automation platform that operationalizes digital rules from regulation and knowledge. Unlike low code platforms, Decisively doesn’t simply automate processes, it automates advice and decision-making across human-readable, natural language regulations and knowledge artifacts. With Decisively, organizations have a viable pathway to enable a deeper level of advice and decision automation in an ever-complex, rules-driven landscape by creating regulatory digital twins.
The company has raised A$3M in equity funding.
Ezypay
Founded by George Holman in 1996 in Sydney and led by CEO James Foster, Ezypay is a payment infrastructure platform that powers subscription and recurring payments. The subscription management platform is processing payments in nine countries across the Asia Pacific region, with over A$3B in payments to date. Ezypay enables advanced revenue collection optimisation as well as complex settlement and payout scenarios. Ezypay’s platform is built to be embedded into other technology platforms (ISVs/SaaS) and Ezypay has a range of partners across industries such as health & fitness, education, childcare, and real estate.
Quant Property Solutions
Founded by Jim Nicol in 2020 in Victoria, Quant Property Solutions is a platform for banks and their customers to minimize losses on distressed property sales during the default process. By taking a data-driven approach that synthesizes a property’s geospecific, hedonic and chronological attributes, financial institutions and their borrowers can market properties that are priced to sell at an optimal price and in a truncated timeframe during the liquidation process, mitigating the possibility of unexpected impact to capital reserve requirements.
The company has raised A$1M in funding.
Succession Plus
Founded by Dr. Craig West in 2020 in Sydney, Capitaliz by Succession Plus is an optimization platform for private businesses and their advisors to maximize the value of the business and position a business for market exit. Capitaliz was developed based on the work of Asia Pacific’s leading exit planning advisory practices and uses millions of industry and exit data points across the globe. Exit advisors are empowered with a 12-step process to maximize and unlock value by leveraging proprietary assessment and valuation algorithms to produce an in-depth report for any business that includes key value drivers, risks, and value gap analysis as well as an actionable implementation roadmap.
truuth
Cofounded by Mike Simpson and Nick Gatland in 2019 in Sydney, truuth is a digital identity verification solution for enterprises and consumers. The company offers a suite of end-to-end solutions for authentication throughout the customer lifecycle from onboarding to ongoing interactions in real-time ensuring KYC, AML, and compliance requirements are met. Truuth’s assurance capabilities leverage a blend of machine learning-powered technologies and facial, voice, and fingerprint recognition to prevent identity theft and safeguard transactions from a holistic and continuous framework.
