Why lenders with the right policy never find the borrowers who need it

Jordan Ralph spent two decades inside banks watching good borrowers get declined. His diagnosis is not that lenders are too strict. It is that finding the right borrower costs more than the loan is worth.

Every time an Australian borrower approaches a lender, they rebuild their financial profile from scratch. Identity verified again. Income proved again. History justified again. Switch lenders and the whole exercise repeats.

Jordan Ralph, Founder of Liquide, spent close to 20 years inside banking and brokerage at ANZ, Westpac and now his own firm. His argument is that this repetition is not an inconvenience. It is a transaction cost, and it is the reason an entire category of lending never happens.

“Markets work best when they reduce the costs of actors in that marketplace finding each other,” Jordan said in the interview. “That is not how the lending market currently works.”

The most specific claim he makes is about lenders rather than borrowers.

A lender with a genuinely niche policy has a smaller but well-targeted market. The difficulty, on Jordan’s account, is that the distribution cost of finding those borrowers and servicing that market is too high to justify.

So the lender adjusts. Policies are moderated. The offering starts to look more mainstream, and the lender returns to competing in the mainstream market where distribution is cheaper.

“You don’t have lenders finding the borrowers, and you don’t have borrowers finding the lenders,” he said.

The result is a market that looks competitive at the centre and is empty at the edges. Not because the appetite is absent, but because the cost of locating demand exceeds the return on serving it.

Jordan describes the realisation as a slow dawning rather than a single moment. He worked across corporate, business and commercial banking, and directly with home loan borrowers, before moving to a regional part of Australia.

That move sharpened it. He now runs a mortgage and business finance broking business in a regional area, and says he sees the pattern almost daily.

“There are examples of many people here who don’t get the same treatment purely because of the place where they live,” he said.

His framing is careful. These are not people seeking bad loans or borrowing irresponsibly. They are people trying to build lives and act on opportunities, who fall outside a uniform application of policy across the banking system.

Some are excluded entirely. Others get finance, but not on reasonable terms or at reasonable cost.

The compounding effect is the part he returns to. Borrowers who feel left out become jaded, and then less willing to engage with the system at all. He calls it a shame, because it removes them from the benefit that responsible use of finance can bring.

The stated vision is a financial system in which capital competes for people rather than people competing for capital.

In practice, Jordan describes it as lowering the transaction cost between borrower and lender so that more needs can be met. For overlooked borrowers, that means niche lenders can find them. For lenders, it means distribution costs fall to a level where a targeted market becomes worth serving.

He has a term for the outcome. Richness. More people able to have their needs met through responsible lending, more opportunities realised, and a richer economic system as a consequence.

He is explicit that Liquide is not a better broking platform. It is intended as a better marketplace for both sides.

The borrower-facing version of the pitch is blunter. Market power returns to the user, who gains the ability to set the terms on which lenders engage them, and to keep testing whether what their existing bank provides remains competitive. This is the mechanism he points to against the loyalty tax.

Jordan is direct about the stage.

This is a pre-seed raise. There is no live customer base and no revenue. Public launch is a month or two away. He self-funded the platform build out of his own pocket.

What he says exists is Horizon 1, which he describes as launch ready and able to go live for public use, with customer validation already beginning. The purpose of the current raise is not to build the platform. It is to prove customer behaviour, and then to fund the move from Horizon 1 to Horizon 2.

Horizon 2 is the mortgage switching mechanism, which he says has been designed and laid out in blueprint. Horizon 3 extends the platform into a balance sheet management tool for banks.

The connecting logic is what he calls evergreen financial profiles. A profile that persists, can be queried, and can be tendered to lenders, rather than being rebuilt at each engagement.

Liquide is being built as a separate platform to Mountway, Jordan’s existing brokerage. Mountway’s client base is intended to serve as the first real-world test cohort.

He describes hundreds of existing customers, trusted relationships going back eight years, and real transactions. The advantage he claims is speed through validation. Real customers with real needs, existing financial profiles to work from, and feedback from people he knows rather than cold users encountering the concept from scratch.

The intent is that the platform arrives as an extension of a service already being provided rather than as an unfamiliar product.

Liquide’s north star metric is active debt under management rather than customer count.

Jordan’s reasoning is that platform access, while carrying a subscription fee, is neither the main economic engine nor a real indicator of value.

“It’s not so much subscriptions, which can be fleeting,” he said. “It’s the body of funds managed through the platform.”

The mechanism he describes is depth. The more financial context a user places on the platform, the stickier it becomes, and the longer their lending stays managed there. It is that duration effect, rather than sign-ups, that he treats as the value driver.

Asked why an incumbent could not simply build the same thing, Jordan’s answer is that the barrier is structural rather than technological.

There is technical challenge, he says, but that is not what stops it.

A bank building this marketplace would be asking individuals to align with a single brand for the rest of their lives, which removes the benefit of having a marketplace in the first place. The proposition depends on independence from any one lender’s balance sheet.

His conclusion is that independent providers could potentially build it, and banks could not.

The expansion argument rests on two pieces of infrastructure.

Jordan draws a distinction between Liquide and data-driven fast approval platforms, which he characterises as offering a version of unsecured lending with limited assessment criteria and a limited range of loan products. Bringing mortgages and property-secured lending onto the back end opens a considerably larger market, covering home and investment lending and a substantial share of small business lending.

That, he says, requires a Torrens title system and an electronic mortgage registry to enable rapid switching, plus a consumer data right regime. He names New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and parts of Europe as jurisdictions where the model could travel.

Alongside the geographic path sits a functional one. A financial profile built for lending could extend to insurance, wealth management, investing and business formation, on the basis that these all draw on the same context as a person moves through different opportunities in their life.

The pitch is not a product. It is a claim about where the inefficiency in lending actually sits, and that claim is more interesting than most fintech theses because it is about supply rather than demand.

If lenders with niche appetite genuinely drift mainstream because distribution costs too much, then the borrowers at the edges are not being rejected on credit grounds. They are being rejected on search costs, which is a solvable problem rather than a risk-based one.

The evidence for that is not yet in. Jordan says so himself, which is the most useful thing an early-stage founder can do.