David Flacks Appointed Chair of Harmoney Board, Trade Me’s Stuart McLean Joins as Director
Parnell, Auckland, 10 June 2016
Peer-to-peer lending marketplace Harmoney has appointed current director David Flacks as its Chair, and Stuart McLean will join the board as a director.
Mr Flacks was initially appointed an independent director of the Harmoney board in May 2014. He is a former top corporate lawyer with more than 30 years of commercial, governance, and strategic experience. Mr Flacks was a partner of Bell Gully from 1987 to 2014, except for four years in the 1990s as general counsel and company secretary of Carter Holt Harvey.
He currently chairs the NZX Markets Disciplinary Tribunal, is a director of Vero Insurance New Zealand, and is a member of the Takeovers Panel. He graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge University.
Trade Me’s new director on the Harmoney board, replacing Jonathon Klouwens, is head of marketplace for Trade Me, Stuart McLean. He has extensive experience in the commercialisation of technology, having served as chief revenue officer at accounting software firm Xero before joining Trade Me in early 2015. Previously, he was head of enterprise for Google Australia and New Zealand, and he has held numerous executive positions at Oracle. He has a degree in computer studies and microsystems from Abertay University.
Harmoney founder and joint CEO Neil Roberts said: “We’re privileged to have benefited from the wisdom and expertise of David and Jonathan, and we’re grateful for Jonathan’s service since Trade Me invested in Harmoney in January 2015. David’s governance skills and commitment to the growth and success of New Zealand companies are unrivalled, and we are pleased that he has accepted the role of Chair. Stuart is a valuable addition to the board and his professional background gives him an intimate understanding of how the Harmoney marketplace works and how we can best position the business to seize opportunities.”
In just 18 months of operation, Harmoney has:
- raised $30 million in working capital and invested substantially in the platform infrastructure and improvements;
- assessed more than $2 billion in loan applications;
- facilitated $250 million in lending;
- paid $20 million in interest to Lenders;
- processed more than 7,500,000 transactions.
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About Harmoney
Harmoney is an online direct personal lender that operates across Australia and New Zealand providing customers with unsecured personal loans that are easy to access, competitively priced (using risk-adjusted interest rates) and accessed 100% online.
Harmoney’s purpose is to help people achieve their goals through financial products that are fair, friendly, and simple to use.
Harmoney’s proprietary digital lending platform, Stellare™, facilitates its personalised loan product with applications processed and loans typically funded within 24 hours of acceptance by the customer. Stellare™ applies a customer’s individual circumstance to its data-driven, machine learning credit scorecard to deliver automated credit decisioning and accurate risk-based pricing.
Business fundamentals
- Harmoney provides risk based priced unsecured personal loans of up to $70,000 for three, five or seven year periods to customers across Australia and NZ
- Its direct-to-consumer and automated loan approval system is underpinned by Harmoney’s scalable Stellare™ proprietary technology platform
- A large percentage of Harmoney’s originations come from 3R™ (repeat) customers
- Harmoney is comprised of a team of ~80 full-time employees across Australia and New Zealand, over half of whom comprise engineering, data science and product professionals
- Harmoney is funded by a number of sources including two “Big-4” bank warehouse programs across Australia and New Zealand and a facility from M&G Investments