Neobank 86 400 raises $34m

Australian smartbank 86 400 has only been active for seven months, but since its launch in September the company has amassed 170,000 accounts and attracted $90 million in capital.

A large chunk of that funding comes from a $34 million Series A capital raising in March, designed to further accelerate product and feature development and support mortgage book growth.

86 400 currently has seven products on offer, expects another three by the end of 2020, and is the only retail neobank in the Australian market to offer home loans and shared accounts; the latter still in the pilot stage.

In an announcement today the Sydney-based group said the recent raise led by international investment bank Morgan Stanley one of the largest Australian fintech Series A rounds to date.

Backers include an Australian superannuation fund, fund managers, high net worth individuals and family offices.

"We're bringing products to market faster than any other bank in Australia, digital or otherwise," says 86 400 CEO Robert Bell (pictured).

"The funding announced today means we can keep our foot firmly on the accelerator, continuing to build out both sides of the ledger and help even more Australians take control of their money.

"At our current rate of growth, we should hit 500,000 accounts on the platform in the next 12 months. Of course, that will be balanced by growing the lending side of our business and we anticipate having a mortgage book of close to $2 billion by the end of 2021."

Bell makes the bold claim that the company is Australia's most advanced neobank.

"Our customers love that we're more than just a great savings rate," he says.

"Of course we do the banking basics extremely well - we've had real-time payments and Apple and Google Pay since day one - but we're also giving them products they would never expect from a bank; tools like account aggregation and Energy Switch that actively help customers save more and budget better.

"All of us want to feel more in control of our finances, particularly in difficult times like these, and we're delivering smart banking products which do just that."

At the moment 86 400 processes 350,000 transactions and balance updates each day, and has yielded a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 46 compared to the Big Four bank average of 2.1

"We always said we were building a bank that puts our customers first before anything else," says chairman Anthony Thomson.

"That's incredibly easy for a bank to say, but much harder to do in practice. I'm pleased to say we're bucking the trend. The Big Four banks would kill to have an NPS as good as ours, and we've achieved that with a fraction of the team that they have."

Business News Australia