Banjo Loans joins the marketplace lending rush
Another marketplace lending hopeful, Banjo Loans, has hung out its shingle, promising to give the business finance market a shake.Banjo Loans is offering unsecured working capital finance of up to A$250,000 to small and medium enterprises.The company, which has an Australian Financial Services Licence, has a funding model that is similar to DirectMoney's: investors put their money in a managed fund that invests in a portfolio of loans.The company is promoting the fund with the prospect of investor returns of around eight per cent to ten per cent. Investment is open only to "sophisticated" and wholesale investors.Banjo Loans chief executive Andrew Colliver said the company had a proprietary lending platform. Loan assessments are done by analysing data from a number of sources, including financial data from accounting services such as MYOB and Xero, bank account statements (accessed through the Yodlee screen scraping system), industry reports and credit files.Customer identification is done electronically, using greenID.The company is promising there will be no paperwork in the process and that successful applicants will have their money in 48 hours.Colliver, a former National Australia Bank executive, said Banjo would market through digital channels and would also look for partnerships with accounting firms and other third parties.The company has launched with $7.5 million of seed funds.Colliver said the business opportunity was to provide business finance to businesses that might otherwise have to rely on the business owner's credit card.