What a year! Each year I always talk about what an amazing year we’ve had reaching new heights and how far we’ve come since we started only 7 years ago. To think now, another year has passed, and our growth has well exceeded expectations. Our business has not only created an amazing place for our staff to work, but we’ve helped thousands of businesses in Australia to get paid, which has been our goal from the very beginning. We continue to innovate and develop new tools with this sole goal in mind. For our customers, providing a service or product has no value if they don’t get paid. At the end of the day, empowering customers to identify risks amounts to one thing: getting paid on time.

Highlights of what our amazing team have launched this year include:

• Bankruptcy Plus – After successfully lobbying AFSA for nearly two years, this product provides data that helps to identify current and previous bankrupt individuals, with the data is integrated into CreditorWatch credit reports
• Datawash report – Our Datawash service now includes an in-depth analytical report which identifies information about data clusters and segments and provides useful suggestions on how to approach this data
• PPSR – CreditorWatch’s latest product allows for the ability to create and manage PPSR registrations. Benefits include bulk registration, renewal reminders, tools to manage registration, competitive rates and compliance accuracy
• Additional Searches and Services – Our customers can now access land titles, international reports, police checks and 4,500+ other products via our integration with Infotrack

If you look at the market conditions over the last 12 months, we’ve seen a reduction in the number of failing unincorporated entities which have dropped by 50%. However, we continue to see high volumes and increases in corporate insolvencies. Our Small Business Risk Review report for Quarter 1, 2018 highlighted an increase in payment defaults versus the previous year, however, there is a level of confidence in the market and SMEs.

Looking ahead, there are obviously some changes in the housing market and banks are tightening their lending so it will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next 12 months.

It’s been a successful year and we are looking forward to what we can achieve this upcoming financial year. Everything we do is for our customers and we value their feedback. We are always thinking about how we can do things differently and provide our customers with what they have been asking for.

As many of you know,  last year we reached a milestone of 50,000 customers. Today, we’ve just passed 10 million credit reports purchased since day one. This is very rewarding for our team which has now grown to just short of 60. Keep an eye out for our latest video which celebrates that milestone and will be launched in July.

I’d like to thank all of our customers who trusted us to make important decisions. And a big thanks to my team who dedicate so many hours to try and achieve our goal of helping businesses get paid.