Yesterday's day-long AltFi conference in Sydney could not have been more coincidentally well-timed for its major sponsor, OnDeck, the US online lender to small business.A week earlier OnDeck had announced its Q4 results from 2015, showing originations grew to during the fourth quarter of 2015, up 51 per cent from the comparable prior year period. Gross revenue was a record $67.6 million on US$557 million loans written that quarter, up 34 per cent from the prior year period.During that same quarter, OnDeck commenced operations in Australia, its first market outside the US. The US lender announced in April 2015 it was setting up in Australia, backed by its US parent, and signing up local accounting software firm MYOB for its potential as a distribution channel - and as a 30 per cent investor. A group of local tech-friendly investors have also taken on a large chunk of equity.OnDeck's chief executive Noah Breslow, in an interview with Banking Day, set out his firm's ambitious goal of being the number one SME online lender in all its key markets - with Australia high on the list.Breslow was keen to differentiate his firm from the ranks of the pure P2P players such as RateSetter, which has set the standard on disclosure with the transparency of its loan book."The funding model for OnDeck evolved differently to other peer-to-peer platforms, for good reason," Breslow said. "The peer-to-peer platforms were already taking on borrowers, who were well served by credit card companies, and refinancing them out (of credit card debt), which means they were disintermediating the market for credit. OnDeck has always been about extending the market for credit. "In our early days we had to take the credit risk ourselves as investors wouldn't take that risk."However, with the launch a year ago of OnDeck's own P2P platform, investors were given a chance to purchase loans directly. Breslow said that OnDeck holds 60 per cent of the loans it originates, backed by money from major banks, hedge funds. It also sells loans to investors, with 40 per cent of loans sold through OnDeck Marketplace, a peer-to-peer platform. Credit scoring has set the firm's plan back a fraction, due to the lack of positive credit reporting in Australia, although Breslow insisted it was not a major difficulty. "We had to adapt our model," he said. "Even in the US, where there is positive credit reporting, not all businesses have a small business credit report. We call those thinner files and we use other sources of information; we collect a lot of cash flow data and we'll weight other data more heavily."The Australian operations will be run by Cameron Poolman, previously CEO of ecommerce site Grays Online. Poolman was one of a group of private investors that included Seek founder Andrew Bassat and longtime SEEK executive Jason Lenga, as well as serial entrepreneur Gavin Solsky, who backed OnDeck Australia."Before we launched in Australia we purchased a lot of retro data from the [credit reference] bureaus and ran it