$1.1m upgrade to the Spenda system released to support continuing customer growth

Following the commercial release of the Spenda Payment Suite in May 2021, this week Cirralto released a major upgrade to the Spenda system.

In addition to the increased functionality enabled, this upgrade delivered the necessary changes and assurance of our transaction scaling capabilities to support our growing customer numbers.

This software release involved the strategic investment of $1.1m to unlock multiple competitive advantages that the company believes will have a payback period within the current financial year and provide the foundation for accelerated domestic customer acquisition and international expansion.

Major enhancements in this release include;

○    Further enhancements to key competitive advantages in customer acquisition technologies, credit profile, deal underwriting and margin enrichment,

○    Inline integration of the Invigo B2B Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services,

○    T+1 automation of merchant funding for BPSP & BPA (Business Payment Solution Provider agreement) & BPA (Business Payment Aggregator agreement) payments,

○    Expanded capabilities for collaborative commerce and data sharing,

○    Scaling capability changes and assurance to support increased payment transaction volumes, and

○    API services to support expanding engagements with technology and marketplace partners.

The release builds on the significant competitive advantages Cirralto currently employs, which can be classified as follows:

Customer Acquisition 

–     Spenda’s integrated solution enables a viral customer acquisition strategy at little or no cost as customers can seamlessly invite their customers into the Spenda network with all parties obtaining a commercial benefit from the process. This is further enriched as customers become borrowers through our in-software lending triggers, resulting in an increase in the average revenue generated per user.

Credit Profile

–     Cirralto is providing convenience credit, or point-of-activity debt, which is aligned to standard trade discounting and as such borrowers are high quality and not in crisis. This coupled with short-cycle lending (less than 90 days) to an ever-broadening cross-section of verticals that uses the ledgers of the buyer and seller, mitigates lending risks and improves the balance of Cirrlato’s lending and payments portfolio.

Credit Underwriting

–     Ledger integration enables access to historical ‘real economy’ activity data in a usable format to make better credit decisions than traditional credit processes (e.g. point of sale data, inventory, purchase orders, buyer-supplier trading history and/or bank cash flows) don’t have access to in such a light-touch data gathering methodology. This information enables enhanced credit analysis, scorecard design/iteration and fraud prevention.

–     The use of our accounts payables and accounts receivables software for payments creates a behavioural history that enables credit decisions and progressive scientific extension of credit limits without “leap of faith” risk.

Margin 

–     Following the recent acquisition of Sydney-based fintech Invigo, the service enhancement enables better control of the ledger, reducing loss and bad debts, which in turn enables Cirralto to access a lower cost of funds from wholesale lenders, enabling the company to offer more competitive rates to its customers.

The release of these new Spenda upgrades are cornerstone functionalities enabling pay later services in B2B trade with enforceable payment agreements at the end of the loan period, benchmarked against standard business terms of trade like 30 days from invoices and 30 days from end of month (EOM).

​​The technology is unique among other B2B pay later services, whether traditional terms of trade or emerging platforms, due to the ability for seamless data transfer and integration between both parties.

The release of the pay later functionality within the Spenda suite enables the business to continue to pursue marketplaces, suppliers, manufacturers and franchise groups and offer risk-free trade for their business customers.

Commenting on the release, Adrian Floate, CEO of Cirralto and MD of Spenda, said, “The team has worked incredibly hard to get this release out on time. We have used this period to rationalise how we develop new products and our leadership has stood up through this period and thought outside the box to solve problems.

“These services are a ‘mark the day moment’ for the Company,  we took significant leaps forward with this release. It will enable us to handle more customers, more efficiently as we continue to move forwards with our growth plans.  Integrating Invigo’s products into the Spenda suite and supporting Pay Now, Pay Later as an on-demand service within the Spenda stack will enable customers to buy what they need, when they need it, with fewer capital constraints and allowing suppliers to get paid faster and convert accounts receivables to cash in near real-time.”

Commenting on the release, Olly Speed, CTO of Spenda, said, “The successful go-live of Spenda Payment Services V2 is a significant technology achievement by the Spenda team.

“These services have been built to automatically scale to support very high sustained and peak transaction loads, on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure platform.

“In an ongoing collaboration between in-house and external Architects and Designers of Microsoft Infrastructure, Application and Security solutions, the team has built an exceptional set of highly-performance and secure cloud-native microservices using Azure serverless technology.

“This means our software processes can automatically scale out under high customer transaction load while doing so cost-effectively. This cost-effective Azure serverless technology is at the heart of our technology strategy to guarantee a commercially effective processing cost per transaction while supporting the significant customer growth in demand for our Pay Now and Pay Later products.

“The team is rightly very proud of this strategic delivery milestone, bringing to market these foundational and visionary B2B software payment services on the Spenda digital ecosystem.”