Login
ISCOVER
The mortgage marketplace has launched a crowdfunding campaign in a bid to help facilitate its growth plans, which include rolling out its own white label loans.
On Tuesday (15 May), mortgage marketplace HashChing launched a crowdfunding campaign with the target of raising $5 million to fund its growth ambitions.
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
Looking for more benefits? Become a Premium Member.
Create free account to get unlimited news articles and more!
Looking for more benefits? Become a Premium Member.
HashChing has invited interested parties — including brokers, investors and borrowers — to invest a minimum of $250 in the mortgage platform via Sydney-based crowdfunding platform Equitise.
Speaking to The Adviser, HashChing CEO Mandeep Sodhi said: “[The] company chose to raise capital via equity crowdfunding to provide an opportunity to the loyal members of the HashChing community to own a part of the company they love, helping build a better financial marketplace.”
The crowdfunding campaign allows retail investors to participate, following the introduction of the Corporations Amendment (Crowd-sourced Funding) Act 2017. This legislation enables retail investors to invest up to $10,000 in any company via a crowd-sourced funding drive.
Previous legislation limited the scope of equity crowdfunding to wholesale or sophisticated investors who earn at least $250,000 a year or have $2.5 million in assets.
The CEO said that the funds would help drive HashChing’s expansion over the next 18 months.
Specifically, Mr Sodhi said that the funds would be used for the development of new go-to market channels in other retail sectors, marketing and public relations, product development and enhancement, recruitment and the scaling of the broker support team.
Further, in an outline of the company’s future product roadmap provided to The Adviser, it was revealed that the mortgage marketplace intends to apply for an Australian Credit License (ACL) to enable it to offer HashChing-branded white label home loans later this year.
The platform also intends to branch into white label business loans and home improvement loans in the financial year 2019.
When asked how the white label loans would be funded, HashChing’s CEO said: “At this stage, the funder of our white label home loans is commercially sensitive, and the offering will be almost entirely managed by HashChing.”
However, the CEO told The Adviser that the products would be “entirely separate” from other market offerings.
“The product will be offered as an independent option for borrowers on the HashChing platform, and will be treated as an entirely separate product to what is available on market,” Mr Sodhi said.
HashChing has also claimed that its crowdfunding campaign would support its plans to disrupt the mortgage market and challenge the major banks, adding that the initiative enables the platform to “stay independent of larger financial institutions”.
“[Punters] have the opportunity to buy into a company that is disrupting the monopoly of the big banks,” the statement read.
“It’s sending a message that the stronghold that the big banks have held over the mortgage market is coming to an end with the success of new tech entrants like HashChing.”
[Related: Bankers’ lack of expense scrutiny shows trust in brokers: HashChing]
