The small business lending sector continues to attract investment into pure play fintechs. One of the newest SME lenders in this category is Sail Business Loans. Co-founder and CEO, Yanir Yakutiel is confident he has a business model that works. With early round funding secured from wealthy family offices "early last year", Sail opened its doors in November last year after "nine to ten months" in development.  Yakutiel said Sail had been "growing exponentially" since Q4 last year, and has written 500 loans in the last six months to June, with an average loan size of around A$35,000.  While fintechs are favoured for their sharp use of the newest credit decisioning and "know your customer" software systems, Yakutiel pointed out that they are actually in the business of providing loans to small business operators - and to decide quickly. He said online applications on his website could be approved or rejected in 15 minutes, but the one crucial aspect for success is to eliminate fraud almost as far as it's possible to go, in addition to running rapid - and accurate - credit checks.   "As you can imagine, when you engage in online lending fraud is a big issue," Yaukutiel said. "It's like a cascade of testing almost done in parallel - first we test that the person is who they say they are. Then we run a credit test assuming they are who they say they are; and if all the information they have given us is correct, do they qualify for our loan? And would they be able to repay our loan?" This year he added technology that includes a biometric 'selfie', saying that his company uses airport level security biometrics provided by a company in Israel - and that's just one way to reduce the risk of fraud.  "Normally, the applicant for a loan would send a photo of the identification - in Australia, this would usually be a driver's licence. In addition, we ask the applicant to send in a selfie and verify the integrity of the documents provided - we can examine it pixel by pixel for signs of tampering.  "And in the third stage is that we take the selfie snap and compare it with the photo identification to make sure it's a live document. That is, that they haven't been taken from a previous photograph such as Facebook page. "Then we use our airport level security system to compare the selfie with a document to make sure it's the same person." It's then a matter of extracting the meta-data and triangulating the information with reliable sources such as government databases. Crucially, Sail has access to secure data feeds from relevant government agencies. "And the third test we run is what we call a risk test - assuming that the ID test is passed and the credit test is passed, what is the marginal effect on our loan book of the loan being applied for?" Yakutiel said his team monitors the risk parameters within their portfolio on a consistent basis.  "Assuming we give