Melbourne, Australia – Thrive, an Australian fintech, has involved itself in a one-of-a-kind business management move with the creation of its Customer Advisory Board (CAB), a board comprising of customers and not trustees, to bestow customers rights and authority to contribute to its operations. 

Thrive is a single integrated banking, accounting, tax and lending platform, and unlike conventional advisory boards that are composed of industry leaders with long leadership experience, Thrive aims to create its own CAB by accepting applications from a variety of different business owners – its customers – ensuring a broad cross-section of feedback, suggestions, and needs are collected. 

Each board member will self-nominate through an application process, with successful applicants receiving shares in Thrive for a 12-month commitment. Meeting monthly, the CAB will be given the ability to help shape Thrive’s product roadmap, marketing strategy and customer service plans. 

According to Michael Nuciforo, CEO at Thrive, the concept was implemented to ensure customers were always front of mind, noting as well that they are the first fintech to do so that has implemented a customer-centric advisory board.

“Nothing is more important to us than our customers, so setting up a Customer Advisory Board that represented the interest of members was the best way for us to hold ourselves accountable to our mission,” Nuciforo stated.

Thrive is currently accepting nominations for the CAB and is looking for business owners who are passionate about helping other businesses improve their financial wellbeing. 

“We expect to get many applications and we can’t wait to select our CAB Members and get this started,” said Ben Winford, co-founder and COO at Thrive.

The application process will conclude on 30 April this year.

Melbourne, Australia – Thrive, an AI-powered fintech aimed at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has announced the initial stages of its crowdfunding, targeting A$3M, on the equity crowdfunding platform Birchal.

The crowdfunding comes after the platform’s interest in launching the Thrive app for its SME waitlist, which has numbered over 7,500 businesses.

According to Thrive’s data, financial admin has been the most disliked activity in running a business and that business owners waste over 42 days a year in managing their financial affairs. This is something that the platform aims to solve by automating banking, accounting tasks, and lending for SMEs. 

Furthermore, Thrive combines a smart business account with value-added services like receipt scanning, invoicing, tax forecasting, payroll, and more. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), these tools are designed to run on autopilot, winning back time for busy business owners and making it easy for them to stay in control of their financial destiny.

“We have been running a number of focus groups with small business owners as we put the finishing touches on our product. After we kept getting asked about investment, we decided that we couldn’t think of anything better than to allow our potential customers to become investors in the business as well,” said Michael Nuciforo, co-founder & CEO of Thrive.

Meanwhile, Thrive Co-founder and COO Ben Winford added, “We were really impressed with the Birchal team and platform. We can’t wait to launch our campaign and to get our members behind us. Crowdfunding presents an exciting opportunity to build our brand, grow our member base and build further advocacy for our business.”