Every founder who has ever signed a commercial lease knows the small indignity of it. You negotiate the rent, the term, the fit-out. Then the landlord asks for a bank guarantee, and everything stops. You go to a Big Four bank, fill in paperwork designed in another era, wait four to six weeks, and watch a chunk of your cash disappear into a security you cannot touch. The office is ready. The lease is signed. You are waiting on a form.
Colin Porter and Dale Hurley knew that feeling well. The pair had already built CreditorWatch, a credit-reporting bureau that muscled its way into a market long held by Equifax and illion. When their own business went looking for new premises, the bank guarantee held up the move - weeks of delay and millions locked away for a piece of paper. Most people grumble and move on. They decided the product itself was broken, and set out to build a bank around fixing it.
That bank is Avenue Bank. Based on Clarence Street in Sydney, it is the first and only bank in Australia to specialise in bank guarantees. Not as one line item buried in a business-banking menu, but as the whole point of the company.
01 / THE PRODUCTWhat a bank guarantee actually is
A bank guarantee is a promise. A landlord, a council or a head contractor wants assurance that if a tenant or supplier walks away, someone good for the money will cover it. A bank steps in and guarantees the amount. It is used constantly - commercial and retail leases, construction retention, tender bonds, advance payments, subdivisions - and for decades it ran on couriered paper, wet signatures and a wait measured in weeks.
Avenue's insight was not that guarantees should exist. They already do, everywhere. It was that the process around them had calcified. The instrument had barely changed since roughly the 1930s, and nobody with the licence to fix it had bothered.
02 / THE FIXFive minutes, then a day
Avenue rebuilt the whole thing as software. You apply online in about five minutes. You sign electronically, verify your details, and deposit the funds. The guarantee is issued within 24 hours, in paper or digital form, with no application or establishment fee. There is no lengthy credit assessment, because Avenue takes a different bet entirely.
Every guarantee it issues is backed 100% by the customer's own cash. That single design choice is what makes the speed possible. When the bank holds the full amount as collateral, it does not need to spend weeks underwriting whether you are good for it - it already has the money. The trade the customer makes is straightforward, and Avenue sweetens it: the security deposit sitting behind the guarantee earns interest, rather than lying dead in a traditional bank's account.
The pricing is deliberately legible. A guarantee fee of around 2.95% per annum, a $5,000 minimum deposit, no minimum term, and a term-deposit product for businesses advertised at rates up to roughly 5.25% p.a. There is no thicket of establishment charges to decode. For a product that traditionally arrived wrapped in opaque process, transparency is itself a feature.
03 / THE CUSTOMERSWho actually needs this
The most visible customer is the tenant securing a lease - a cafe, a law firm, a retailer taking a shopfront. But the guarantee suite reaches well beyond leasing. Developers, builders and contractors lean on performance, retention, tender and advance-payment guarantees to win and deliver work. Any business asked to post security to a landlord, a council or a principal contractor is in Avenue's market.
Commercial & retail leases
Tenants securing a shopfront or office get their guarantee in a day, so the lease can start on time instead of stalling in a queue.
Construction & contracts
Builders and contractors post performance, retention and tender bonds without weeks of paperwork or tied-up working capital.
The through-line is cash flow. Money parked behind a guarantee is money a business cannot deploy into staff, stock or growth. Avenue's pitch is not really "faster paperwork." It is "get your working capital moving, and get the security done in an afternoon."
04 / THE MOATWhy one product, done deeply
It would be easy to read Avenue as a bank that hasn't finished building itself - only guarantees, only deposits, no cards or lending. That reading misses the strategy. The Big Four issue guarantees, but as a slow, low-priority add-on to sprawling businesses. Surety providers and insurers offer alternatives, but not as a licensed bank with a digital front door. Avenue chose to go narrow and deep: nine guarantee types, one obsessive focus, and the regulatory standing of a real bank behind it.
05 / THE PEOPLEReps, not résumés
Running the bank is Peita Piper, CEO since 2019 and a founding employee. She is an engineer by training who started in strategy consulting at Accenture before becoming the fourth employee at digital bank Ubank - which means she has now helped build a digital bank from scratch more than once. The management bench around her spans risk, operations, credit and sales, assembled over the long climb to launch.
That climb was not short. Avenue was founded in 2018 and spent roughly four and a half years getting to market, threading COVID, an APRA licensing moratorium and shifting regulation. Piper's description of how you survive that stretch is refreshingly unglamorous.
06 / THE MONEYBackers and the licence
Avenue raised a Series B publicly reported at A$37 million, led by Liberty Financial Group (ASX:LFG), the funding to build core banking technology and execute a market entry. The technology stack was built with SAP Fioneer for core banking and runs on AWS cloud infrastructure - a single-product bank assembled for the cloud rather than migrated onto it.
The milestone that made it all real arrived in March 2024, when APRA granted Avenue an unrestricted licence to operate as an authorised deposit-taking institution. That is the difference between a fintech that resembles a bank and one that is a bank. The business model follows from it: Avenue earns a fee on the guarantees it issues and funds itself through deposits, while the full cash-backing keeps it clear of the credit losses that come with traditional lending.
07 / THE MARKETThe overlooked corner
The lesson buried in Avenue's story is one plenty of founders will recognise. The best openings are often the ones that look too dull to bother with. Bank guarantees are unglamorous, procedural and easy to ignore - which is exactly why the incumbents let the product ossify for the better part of a century. Avenue walked into a corner of banking that was large, boring and wide open, and planted a flag.
There is room to expand later - cards, lending, a broader business bank were always part of the founding ambition. But the wedge is the guarantee, and the discipline is staying on it until it is unmistakably theirs. In a fintech landscape crowded with apps chasing the same consumer, Avenue's bet is that depth in an ignored niche beats breadth in a loud one.