Enterprise: Codat
USP: The platform provides real-time connectivity that enables software providers and financial institutions to build integrated products for their small-business customers.
Codat was co-founded in 2017 by Peter Lord, Alex Cardona and Dave Hoare, who met working for an alternative lender. While there, they witnessed the pain and frustration of both trying to collect business data from customers manually and building integrations first-hand.
Codat’s head of Australian operations, Matt Tyrrell, describes the platform as “the universal API for small-business data”. It provides real-time connectivity that enables software providers and financial institutions to build integrated products for their small-business customers. “We connect to over 30 different platforms – including Xero, Shopify, Paypal and MYOB – and enable SMEs to securely share accurate business data with financial institutions in a few clicks, allowing them to better access financial services,” Matt explains.
With clients ranging from lenders to corporate card providers and business forecasting tools, the platform facilitates automatic reconciliation, business dashboarding and loan decisioning, among other functions.
“There’s nothing sexy about building integrations into small-business financial platforms and it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve.”
Prior to joining Codat, Matt founded management software start-up CurrencyVue – a software platform that helped SMEs manage international payments and hedging. “Getting involved with Codat was an easy decision, as I am passionate about providing financial institutions with solutions to aid universal pain points, particularly around manual administration and financial data for their small-business customers,” Matt says. “Just before I joined Codat, I was speaking to them as a prospective customer. I had experienced first-hand the pain of building integrations and the value that these features can provide to small businesses. I identified with the problem they were trying to solve and could see the size of the opportunity in bringing that to the APAC market.
“There’s nothing sexy about building integrations into small-business financial platforms and it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve,” Matts adds. “But it is useful to so many different providers in the industry across a variety of different use cases. It’s that combination of being a ‘boring’, hard problem to solve, with huge utility, that makes the concept of Codat so powerful.”
A determined advocate for the advancement of fintech, Matt aims to help his clients enhance their own offerings and provide innovative features that make small-business owners’ lives easier. “By unblocking administrative hurdles for our fintech clients, [we allow them to] focus on building the technology that will shape the next wave of financial services,” he avers.
One example of this advocacy is Codat’s partnership with Basiq, which aims to bring additional functionality to open banking. “To date, Australia’s efforts to deploy open banking, or the Consumer Data Right (CDR), within a business context have been hindered by red tape and inefficient opt-in processes,” Matt explains. “In its current state, there isn’t enough data to be valuable to fintech innovators, some of whom have spent millions to be able to access the system. Our integration with Basiq will make transactions from more than 20 Australian banks available to financial service providers and fintechs. For providers, it will unlock all the data needed for underwriting in a single integration, without asking clients to share sensitive financial data via email.”
Looking to the future, Matt is focused on expanding Codat’s presence, including its headcount, customer base and product roadmap. “As the Australian fintech ecosystem matures, providers are increasingly expanding into adjacent financial products, moving from payments into lending, from lending into financial management and more,” Matt says. “Over the coming year, we’re doubling down on our specialist products for lenders, corporate card and point-of-sale providers and supporting those clients in solving the biggest problems of their small-businesses customers through connectivity.”
This article first appeared in issue 39 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
