From GetCapital to Shift: Building Australia’s leading B2B lending platform

James Spence has one of the more unusual paths into fintech. He started as an aerospace engineer before pivoting to management consulting, then landing at Shift where he now leads product strategy. In this conversation he unpacks what it takes to build a data platform inside a financial services business, why Shift rebranded from GetCapital, and the one thing he believes separates great companies from average ones.

Shift has been doubling revenue every year for seven years. James walks through the deliberate decisions behind the business: building a proprietary data layer to make faster credit decisions, expanding from unsecured business loans into trade credit, and creating an autonomous culture that lets smart people do their best work.

“Strategy without execution is just a dream. The companies that win are the ones that can actually get things done.”

The rebrand from GetCapital to Shift

The name GetCapital made sense when the business was a single-product lender. As Shift expanded its suite of financial products for Australian SMEs, the old name became a constraint. The rebrand to Shift created space to grow into a broader financial services platform without being anchored to one product category.

Building a data platform in lending

Most traditional lenders rely on static credit bureau data and financial statements. Shift invested early in a proprietary data platform that ingests real-time business transaction data, enabling faster credit decisions, better risk pricing, and better outcomes for SME customers.

“The data platform is the moat. If you can make better credit decisions than anyone else, you win on price, speed, and approval rates.”

Trade credit as a growth lever

While most people think of business lending as term loans, trade credit is a massive and largely underserved market. Shift moved into this space as a natural extension of its data capabilities, offering SMEs a way to manage cash flow across their supply chain relationships.

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