Credit Suisse provided $350 million in funding late last year to the business lender, which is lead by former NAB bankers Joseph Healy and David Hornery.
Lawyers Ashurst advised on both facilities. The latest $100 million injection from Goldman is an important wholesale funding source for Judo as it progresses with its plans to be an authorised deposit-taking institution and expands its SME lending business.
Judo Capital has set its sights on becoming a major player in the business banking space, following in the footsteps of UK-based small business banking disruptors Aldermore and Shawbrook that have forged a unique way of helping to unleash the potential of small business customers by providing old fashioned relationship banking with modern, legacy-free technology, processes and systems.
Unlike the many ‘fintech’ lenders that have hit the Australian SME lending market in recent years, Judo has a formidable team of experienced co-founders: former NAB group executive and business bank CEO Joseph Healy, fellow NAB alumni David Hornery, Kate Keenan, Tim Alexander, Malcolm Hiscock, Jacqui Colwell and ex-UBank CEO Alex Twigg.
The co-founder team also includes Standard Chartered’s former global head of personal banking Chris Bayliss, who served as a NAB EGM between 2010 and 2012.
“Judo is being purpose-built from a blank sheet of paper, free from bureaucracy and legacy systems. And whilst we are leveraging the latest technology as an enabler to premium service, it is the depth of the relationships that we will build with our small business customers that will define us and set us apart from the rest,” Mr Bayliss said.
“We are following a path that has been well trodden in the UK. Post-2008, a number of challenger banks emerged in the UK SME space: Aldermore, Shawbrook, Handlesbanken, to name a few. They all saw the same opportunity: a space for a new challenger bank to emerge that anchored themselves on the old-fashioned values of traditional relationship banking.”
