SME lender Judo Bank has become the first company in Australia to link up with UK fintech Codat, a specialist provider of integrated bank statements for small businesses.
Codat has made waves in the UK by creating a product that can bring together the multiple accounting software programs that SMEs use, allowing lenders to action decisions more quickly with more data in front of them.
“Codat is what we term as a universal API for business data,” said their APAC commercial director Matthew Tyrrell. “We help banks and fintechs and software companies to build integrated products for SME clients.”
“Judo is our first key foundation customer in the APAC region, as we’ve only recently launched here, and we’re really looking forward to working with them.”
Codat was founded to solve problems that fintechs in the UK found in getting SME clients the loans that they needed without a full credit history.
“The business was started by developers that were tasked with working for a fintech in the UK that was building integration with accounting platforms and automating the whole process of capturing accounts and financial statements,” said Tyrrell.
“As a business, it’s built by developers for developers: we think we can significantly reduce the time it takes for SMEs to access funding.”
“With cloud accounting, in particular in APAC where it is so strong through companies like Xero, having that data online is one of the key parts that makes Codat possible.”
“Our value proposition centres around our customers being able to connect to one API, through Codat, to access 19 different accounting platforms.”
“We then standardise that data – that’s our secret sauce. We’re not manipulating it, we’re just categorising it into one set of financial statements, like balance sheets and profit/loss, that can be compared like for like.”
“Accounting is complex and very configurable. We distil that down so that decisions around lending can be automated as much as possible.”
