Bendigo and Adelaide Bank-backed home lending platform Tic:Toc rebranded to Tiimely

Adelaide-based lending tech company Tic:Toc has changed its name, as the Anthony Baum-backed business makes a push for more bank customers.

Tiimely founder and chief executive Anthony Baum

The Bendigo and Adelaide Bank-backed home lending platform Tic:Toc has changed its name to Tiimely in a move the company says reflects its shift away from directly writing loans and towards offering its systems to other ­lenders.

Tiimely, which launched in 2017, offers a loan assessment platform that borrowers can access through banks that use the service, or it can directly take on debts recorded against Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s balance sheet.

Tiimely boss and founder Anthony Baum said the name change was a recognition that more than half the company’s revenues were coming from its platform business, selling its services to other lenders.

Mr Baum said 15-20 enterprise customers were already using ­Tiimely’s lending platform, including two large Australian banks.

But he said Tiimely was targeting more of the market, aiming to offer an industry platform for banks to assess “credit readiness” and borrower hardship.

“It’s not only the number of customers – our relationship is deepening with a number of our customers,” he said.

“We find they’re now using two to three modules from our platform. They might have used those modules initially for a single use case – a home loan application – but they’re now using them for their customer readiness pre-application assessment.”

Mr Baum said the name change was about recognising that the company was a “platform company”.

“The rebrand is about recognition of our transition as a business and eliminating confusion of who we are,” he said.

“Some people think we’re a retail business that does a little bit of tech. Other people mix us up with TikTok. This rebrand creates that clear space.”

Tic:Toc, which is part-owned by Bendigo Bank, won a battle against TikTok in March this year after the Chinese tech company took action over the company’s name. TikTok launched in Australia in 2019, two years after Tic:Toc’s launch.

Mr Baum said Tiimely was “always a tech company”, noting the company had “never looked to compete with banks and never looked to be a non-bank lender”.

But he noted the company’s lending platform, which wrote loans against Bendigo’s balance sheet, had reached almost 3 per cent of overall home lending flows in some months.

“Whether the RBA moved or not or whether securitisation was competitive or not would not have changed things for us,” Mr Baum said.

Tiimely raised $54m in February this year, valuing the business at $254m.

Mr Baum said he planned to continue as a private business “for the short to medium term”.