50 lending partners live for Swoop Funding.
Australian launch led from zero, with no one on the ground and no lender on the panel
- Sector
- Fintech, SME funding marketplace
- Based in
- London, United Kingdom
The numbers
Supply side
- 50lending partnerslisted
- 110live products
From Stephen Mullan's records as Country Manager
Demand side
- 2,300SMEs and adviserssecured
- A$12Min SME finance
From the same records
Where they started
Swoop arrived in Australia with a proven product and no local footprint: no team, no lending partners, no SME users and no partner channels. A marketplace needs both sides at once, so the first job was to sign lenders before there was demand to show them, and bring in borrowers before there were many products to match them to. Every lender conversation started cold, with a brand no Australian lender had heard of.
How the launch ran
Stephen Mullan, now the founder of Forás, led the launch as Swoop's Country Manager, with P&L responsibility for the Australian business. He set the go-to-market and product strategy and built a local team of six, three of them account managers.
Supply came first: the team signed and integrated lenders before there was demand to show them, several through API integrations. Demand followed, through digital origination channels for SMEs and financial advisers. Alongside the marketplace, he ran two white-label platform builds, for Australia's second-largest chamber of commerce and for a foreign-exchange firm with 3,000 clients.
The stack
Australia was a new market for us and we had no one on the ground. Stephen went in and built the whole thing: the team, the lender panel, the partner channels and the integrations. He turned a cold market into a working marketplace with real funding flowing to Australian businesses. We could not have launched Australia the way we did without him.
Ciaran BurkeCo-founder, Swoop FundingEntering Australia? Talk to us first.
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