Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform Harmoney Appoints Chairman

Auckland, 20 May 2014

New Peer to Peer Lender Harmoney today announced the appointment of Rob Campbell as its founding chairman. Campbell’s current directorships include Somerset, Tourism Holdings and Localist. He recently retired as Chairman of Guinness Peat Group (GPG) having completed the divestment mandate.

Peer to Peer lending and other forms of crowd funding were enabled in New Zealand by the Financial Markets Conduct Act which came into effect on 1 April. Peer to Peer Lending, described by The Economist* as ‘banking without the banks’, provides consumer finance by matching investors and borrowers on an automated online platform and is growing at 200% pa in the USA and Europe.

Harmoney Chief Executive Neil Roberts says Harmoney is delighted to announce the appointment. “Banking without the banks essentially means we are taking a traditional proven and highly profitable product category and opening it up to the investing public through technology. Rob Campbell’s previous experience as a director of Bank of New Zealand, and past chairman of BNZ Finance and of the investment committee of New Zealand’s largest fund manager, ACC, will help guide us in taking Harmoney’s offer to market,” Roberts says.

Campbell states two key reasons for accepting the role. First, New Zealanders have limited places to invest in fixed interest investments so the advent of Peer to Peer lending means that, for the first time, this 100 year old asset class will be made available to the public with retail rates of return. Second, the Harmoney team has a proven New Zealand track record in this space as the core team that started the consumer finance business for listed company Pacific Retail Group, achieving $1.5b in sales over five years before the finance business was sold to GE Money.

Harmoney is currently applying for an operating license through the Financial Markets Authority and expects to begin trading later this year. Further board appointments will be announced in the next month.

*The Economist, March 2014

ENDS

For more information:
Julien Leys, PR Partners, +64 21 655 598

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