Fintech Thrive takes another stride towards launch with Mastercard partnership

Melbourne-based fintech Thrive has announced a new partnership with global payments giant Mastercard ahead of its expected launch later in the year.

The partnership means that Thrive, which is in the process of creating an all-in-one banking, accounting, tax and lending solution for Australian small businesses, will have a debit card ready to go for customers alongside its business account and online platform.

“The team at Thrive truly understand the frustrations and challenges that come with running your own business and the impact that intelligent digital payment solutions can have on business success,” said Kallan Hogan, vice president of account development at Mastercard Australasia.

“As SMEs around Australia continue to evolve their operations in response to the pandemic, there’s never been a better time to offer a product that lightens the load and lets these organisations focus on what they do best. As an organisation that is committed to supporting local small business, Mastercard is excited to partner with Thrive on the next step of its journey.”

In addition to teaming up with Mastercard, Thrive is also expected to announce a partnership with a - currently unknown - Australian authorised deposit-taking institution (ADI) in the next few months.

What’s Thrive all about?

Founded in 2019, Thrive’s aim is to simplify ‘financial admin’ for small businesses and, ultimately, save them time and money.

To do that, the Thrive platform will use customer transaction data and artificial intelligence to help facilitate what it sees as the ‘four quadrants’ to the financial management of a business: banking, accounting, tax and working capital.

According to co-founder and chief executive, Michael Nuciforo, the desire to make life easier for small businesses came from personal experience.

“A lot of the Thrive team, including myself, have run businesses before and it just takes a huge amount of effort to stay on top of all of the financial admin involved in running one - from doing payroll, to paying bills and doing cash flow forecasts. Effectively that means that small business owners also have to be CFOs.

“As a business you’ll often need to have a business bank account, an invoicing solution, an accounting package as well as a human accountant and bookkeeper. That’s why Thrive is pretty unique, because we essentially take all of that and put it into one product.

“The way we’re able to do that is by using the transaction data that’s fed through by our customers and essentially creating a set of rules around that data to automate all of those standard financial admin tasks.”

When the service first launches, customers will be able to access the Thrive business account (online or via a smartphone app for iOS or Android) and the features on offer with it, as well as make day-to-day transactions with the debit Mastercard.

However, Nuciforo says lending products won’t be far behind.

“We’re looking to launch early in the second half of the year and that will include a business account and debit card, then later in the year we’re looking to launch our first lending products: overdrafts, fixed term loans and credit cards.

“We’ve agreed a lending facility with an existing Australian authorised deposit-taking institution which will allow us to draw down on an agreed set of funds and, in turn, lend that money out to businesses.

“Because we’re already going to have all the information a bank would generally require from a business seeking a loan, we’re going to be able to offer customers a relatively seamless experience. There won’t be a need for other people to be involved and a business will be able to make an application and get a decision in real time.”

According to Thrive, over 7,500 small businesses have already signed up to their waitlist app for early access which can be done via their website.

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