MoneyMe delivers 252 percent growth, acquires SocietyOne

Consumer retail credit business MoneyMe has been taking on incumbent lenders in the market since listing in 2019, and has delivered a growth rate of 252 percent half year on half year.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to MoneyMe CFO, Neal Hawkins about the business’ key milestones in the last 12 months, and its focus on high and profitable, tech-enabled growth.

According to Hawkins, having listed just a month before Covid hit, the organisation had to calibrate quickly in order to respond to changing demands.

“That's the good thing about having a digital business model you can do just that. So we’ve already gone into the the Covid situation with a really diversified portfolio, and that's the key thing, you're sort of already set up for success,” he said.

The fintech took the pandemic disruption as an opportunity to diversify the business and grow both organically and inorganically.

One recent inorganic growth opportunity was MoneyMe’s acquisition of SocietyOne.

Discussing the acquisition Hawkins said, “Things came together quite quickly just because there was a lot of alignment in terms of where their business was and where ours was. We had some really good productive discussions with the exec and at the board level agreed quite quickly that we thought, ‘Hey, there's a really good transaction here for all shareholders to benefit from.’”

SocietyOne’s customer demographic is different to MoneyMe’s with an average borrower age of 45, versus 30, as well as SocietyOne customers being largely home loan and home owner consumers.

“They’ve been able to develop a really well-known brand within the Australian market and really well respected brand. They've also got a really well setup broker channel. So that's a great opportunity, whereas for MoneyMe the focus, the genesis has very much been digital, and direct to consumer origination. That's really where we've being able to deliver great runs on the board.
So you can see those distribution channels are really quite complimentary and there's a lot of opportunity to cross sell.”

According to Hawkins, in his role as CFO he will be supporting the expansion into the greater addressable market, and working to embed the right culture in the business.

“We've got a very clear sort of set of values we aspire to,” said Hawkins.

“A key thing is if we keep those, that sort of founder led sort of focus, that innovation, that profit with purpose, that underpins how we're going to progress through what you'll see us doing.”