Who lends to Australian businesses, and what each tier will actually take
Placement is not a ranking exercise from cheapest to dearest. Each tier is solving a different problem, and a file that is wrong for one is often routine for the next.
The Australian business lending market runs in tiers that overlap at the edges. What separates them is not size but what they are willing to be uncertain about: the majors want certainty from history, the non-banks will take certainty from current trading, and private credit will take certainty from the exit.
A broker's real panel is narrower than the market. Knowing which three lenders take this shape of file, and which one will do it without a month of document requests, is worth more than access to thirty.
Major banks
Cheapest money, deepest policy, slowest process. They read the lodged financials as the primary source and want the business to look like the business they already understand. Best for established, asset-backed borrowers with clean, current accounts and no deadline.
Second-tier and regional banks
Bank pricing with different policy. Different industry lists, different entity tolerances, different appetite by state and sector. The most under-used tier, and often where a file declined by a major for structure is simply written.
Non-bank lenders
Read current trading rather than a lodged return, so a strong twelve months can outweigh a weak last year. Faster, more expensive than a bank, and where most unsecured business term lending is written.
Fintech and cash-flow lenders
Decision driven by transaction data, settlement measured in days. Genuinely useful for small, urgent, short-duration needs, and genuinely dangerous when used to fund a structural gap. See cash advances.
Private credit and specialist lenders
Security and exit driven. The question is not what the business earned but what repays the facility and what happens if it does not. Short, expensive, and appropriate where the exit is real — see private lending.
Asset and equipment financiers
A separate discipline with its own panel: the asset carries the deal, and the tiering runs on asset class and resale rather than on the borrower's balance sheet.
Six things decide the tier before pricing is discussed at all.
- How current the evidence is. A lodged return that describes the business is bank territory. A return that does not, with twelve strong months behind it, is non-bank territory.
- Whether property is available and offered. Two separate questions, and together they draw the sharpest line on the panel.
- The deadline. A file with three weeks and a supplier holding stock cannot go where the process takes six. Speed has a price and the borrower should be told what it is.
- Industry and entity. Exclusion lists and trust structures differ tier by tier and lender by lender, which is why a structural decline is a placement problem, not a credit problem.
- What the repayment source is. Contracted revenue, a settled receivable and a forecast pipeline get treated very differently, and the further into forecast you go the further down the tiers you travel.
- The size of the ask relative to the business. Every lender writes within a range, and a facility that is large relative to the earnings moves tiers regardless of how good the business is.
Where the answers point downward, that is information for the borrower rather than a failure — the same deal at a different tier is a different product with a different cost and a different term.
Business credit was growing 10.8% year on year to the end of July (RBA Financial Aggregates, July 2026), and June 2026 was the strongest post-pandemic month for business lending, adding $19.3bn to a national book of $1.26tn (APRA Monthly ADI Statistics, June 2026). That growth is not evenly distributed across the tiers.
The non-bank side has expanded fastest, and Australia's private credit market now runs to roughly $225bn (The Adviser, August 2026). It is not a one-way story: some Australian real-estate credit funds gated redemptions across July and August 2026 (trade press, August 2026), which is a reminder that a lender's own funding conditions decide its appetite as much as its policy does. The broader shift is covered in the non-bank moment.
We are not a lender, we do not have a panel, and we do not match borrowers to lenders. We generate the enquiry and supply it to one broker, who decides where it goes.
Every business loan lead carries the amount, purpose, timeframe and the borrower's own notes, so the tier conversation can start before the first call. Sold once, to one broker, never resold, delivered to your inbox or CRM in real time. Pay per lead, no lock-in contracts, no setup fees, and the lead is an introduction, not a recommendation.