The Bank dedicated to Aussie businesses has arrived

The book is all but closed on Judo Bank’s blockbuster capital raising, with $345 million in firm commitments and an unnamed institution granted an extension of a few weeks to complete due diligence on a significant investment.

Judo co-founder Joseph Healy expects total proceeds to exceed $400m by the end of this week.

By the close of the June financial year, the challenger bank will have raised $550m in equity over the last 12 months — testimony to the market’s firm belief that the big four’s stranglehold on commercial lending in this country is ripe for disruption.

Judo Bank co-founder and CIO, Alex Twigg, will tell you he doesn’t do digital transformation - instead he does digital.

“The tech strategy has always been that we would be a completely cloud-based organisation. We would also take a completely software-as-a-service model approach to our technology strategy so that we don’t own a single server and we don’t employ a single developer,” Twigg told CIO Australia.

It was a London investor who laid out just how tough Joseph Healy and David Hornery were going to find setting up a bank from scratch in Australia.

The two former National Australia Bank executives had the idea for their challenger bank Judo over Friday night beers at Sydney's Greengate pub and were in the United Kingdom talking to investors in challenger banks there.