‍👉 Background: MYOB, which actually stands for Mind Your Own Business, is the well-known Australian accounting software company. It was founded back in 1991 when it was battling out against Quicken for CD-Rom-Accounting-dominance. But since then, Xero has entered the accounting cloud market and shaken things up.

‍👉 What happened: While MYOB is battling with Xero for accounting dominance, it also has its eyes on another prize. It has just announced plans to compete with the big banks by launching a bank account with Great Southern Bank’s banking licence.

‍👉 What else: According to market research firm Kantar, the majority of Australia’s 1.6 million sole traders don’t use a business bank account. While it’s hard to know how many subscribers MYOB has today (because it's private), it had nearly 630,000 back in 2018. And this new strategy will put them head-on with CBA, NAB, ANZ and Westpac for business customers.

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‍What's the key learning?

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‍💡Owning the customer relationship has become the holy grail in finance. MYOB already has access to small business finances through its software… so offering a bank account is a natural next step.

💡This type of expansion is becoming more and more common in fintech. In fact, companies like Square (now Block) and PayPal started in payments, but have expanded across the whole financial services industry such as lending, banking and even tax tools.

💡PayPal's small business lending arm has originated $30 billion USD in loans since 2013. And while there’s some risk involved, the rewards are enormous. So this might be the beginning of a very lucrative model for MYOB.