OFX celebrates a momentous $100bn transfers internationally milestone
MEDIA RELEASE: OFX, Australia’s leading international payments provider and Fintech leader, have today announced a significant milestone in their transaction history, reaching $100bn in international transfers since launching nearly 18 years ago. The announcement follows CEO Richard Kimber’s first financial year results, revealing the company exceeded $100m in profit for FY16. In the process of notching up their billion-dollar century, OFX have helped customers with more than 5 million bank-to-bank transfers. An estimated 31,000 properties have been bought or funded, over 10 thousand students supported and countless other weird and wonderful things financed. Whether it’s blocks of Italian marble for a sculptor’s next masterpiece, containers of pig’s ears […]
VentureCrowd gives Aussie investors access to blue chip corporate bonds
MEDIA RELEASE — VentureCrowd, Australia’s original and most successful equity-based crowdfunding platform, has launched a new investment opportunity for its registered wholesale investors, giving them unique access to the Artesian Australian Corporate Bond Fund ARSN 604 744 783 on the same terms as institutional investors. Eligible VentureCrowd investors can register interest in the fund online. The Artesian Australian Corporate Bond Fund offers investors an investment opportunity in a diversified fund holding Australian dollar corporate bonds, professionally managed by Artesian. With Australian interest rates at all-time lows, floating rate note securities offer fixed income investors opportunities to take advantage of rising rates when interest rates bottom out and begin to rise. Although the […]
Local tech innovators recognised
A Perth-based fintech startup has been named one of the top finalists in Silicon Valley Forum’s World Cup Tech Challenge, while the winners of a hackathon hosted by BHP Billiton and Unearthed have also been revealed. Local entrepreneur Graeme Speak’s BankVault technology has been selected in the top 24 startups worldwide for the World Cup Tech Challenge. BankVaultonline.com prevents bank accounts from being hacked, and involves placing a physical computing device in an office which communicates with a counterpart service running in a remote data centre. The system is immune to malware and other techniques used by hackers because it runs separately to the user’s own network. BankVault is one […]
Blockchain is here to stay
Blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin, is the talk of the town at the moment. The financial services industry can’t get enough of it. The enthusiasm essentially boils down to the technology’s potential to reduce the financial transaction costs while ensuring robust security. While Bitcoin is unlikely to be make traditional currency extinct, blockchain has provided the impetus needed for new and innovative research into how the slow and often expensive centralised financial transaction systems that dominate banking, so what is this blockchain? Put simply, blockchain is a data structure that can be used to create digital ledgers of transactions shared among a distributed network of participating organisations. Financial institutions […]
Need to Know: Practical Bitcoin basics
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the phrase Bitcoin uttered around tech circles, or maybe even on mainstream news outlets. Maybe you’ve seen Bitcoin as a payment option on stores like Steam and Microsoft’s. But what is Bitcoin, why should you care and is it worth bothering with? As to what Bitcoin is, simply put, it’s way of transferring money around. Some people think it’s a challenge to government reserve banks (probably not) or a whole new system of finance technology akin to the credit card (quite likely), but for us plebs, right now, it’s main utility is cheaply and quickly sending money from A to […]
Birch Finance presents at TechCrunch Disrupt 2016 in New York
MEDIA RELEASE: Sydney based fintech startup Birch Finance, has been inundated with traffic off the back of their TechCrunch disrupt launch in New York last week. Alexander Cohen and Alexander Whiteside of Birch Finance were selected from hundreds of startups to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, in the startup battlefield on Wednesday the 11th of May. Last week, Birch Finance, a startup in the current cohort of the H2 Ventures fintech accelerator, competed at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield. The Battlefield included 22 leading early stage startups pitching to top judges in front of a live audience. Birch are following in the footsteps of successful companies like Betterment, […]
IPOs getting bigger, but small caps still outperform, OnMarket BookBuilds says
Initial public offerings on the ASX are getting bigger and small cap floats and private equity exits are the best performers, according to data compiled by OnMarket BookBuilds. The fintech company’s managing director Tim Eisenhauer said the past five years have seen a changing of the guard, as the end of the resources boom resulted in the number of mining company floats falling, while more technology companies sought to grow their fledgling businesses through listings. OnMarket BookBuilds’ research takes in the first quarter of 2016, but the trend is already evident in the second quarter, where high-profile listings, including WiseTech Global, Afterpay and Monday’s Redbubble float, are all well over […]
DirectMoney unable to fully fund loan demand
Australia’s only listed P2P lender, DirectMoney, says it is unable to fully fund its loans and is asking borrowers if it can refer them to another lender. Chairman Stephen Porges said it is still looking for institutional funders beyond the one it has – Macquarie Bank – to fund the loan demand it has.Until it gets more institutional money he said it does not have enough cash to lend to all the borrowers applying for loans via its website. “The company remains intensely focused on progressing loan sales to institutions and development of a funding warehouse. At the same time we are rolling out a strong marketing program for [its […]
