Credit Clear makes strong gain on ASX debut

John Kavanagh

Receivables management specialist Credit Clear made its debut on the Australian Securities Exchange yesterday, after raising A$15 million through an initial public offering last month.

Investors, who subscribed at 35 cents a share, saw their holdings increase by 31.4 per cent as the stock climbed to a close of 46 cents. The company has a free float of 51 per cent.

Credit Clear offers what it calls a “full-service suite of receivables services, allowing clients to manage communications and payment arrangements with their customers through a digital and mobile interface”.

Its pitch is that it helps clients with better customer engagement and insight, faster payment reconciliations, improved cash flows and lower collection costs. It also offers debt recovery services through a recently acquired business, Credit Solutions.

According to the prospectus: “Traditionally, receivables management services involved businesses placing non-performing accounts that have been deemed uncollectable with an external agency.

“Over time, service providers have evolved their offerings to encompass additional support services. Technological advances in communication and collections software have broadened the scope of products and services available to the market. Services such as mobile payment processing, portal and gateway management, customer engagement analytics and real-time performance tracking are now core requirements for many large contracts.

“The opportunity identified by Credit Clear was that consumers could be willing and able to either pay in full or start to contribute towards a reduction of their overdue invoices, however due to traditional methods of collection they were not presented with a simple solution to do so.”

The company has developed its own technology and generates revenue from fee for service activity, recovery commissions and platform licensing income.

Credit Clear was founded in 2015. It reported a loss of $4.3 million on revenue of $6.5 million for the year to June, following a loss of $3.5 million on revenue of $1 million in 2018/19.

The chair is Gerd Schenkel, a former chief executive of Tyro Payments and the chief executive is Brenton Glaister, who has been in the receivables management industry since the 1980s.