ScotPac and Trade Ledger partnership supercharges business funding
Australia and New Zealand non-bank lender ScotPac, and global digital lending platform innovator Trade Ledger have joined forces to create a market-leading origination and underwriting experience for business funding.
The partnership is a game-changer for business owners and their advisers, dramatically reducing application turnaround times and ensuring that ScotPac is one of the few business financiers able to quickly finalise funding for both simple and complex deals.
“ScotPac and Trade Ledger have created a fully digital experience that is simple for the end user, whether they are a small businesses or large corporation. The goal is to transform business funding so it’s easily accessible for SMEs,” ScotPac CEO Jon Sutton said.
“SMEs can quickly access multiple products (including our debtor finance, asset finance and trade finance), to solve their most bespoke or complex funding problems. The value of speed and consistency is massive for business owners, and for our broker and accountant partners.”
ScotPac is using Trade Ledger’s data-driven lending platform to unlock all types of working capital and business lending products for SMEs who cannot always easily access finance.
The Trade Ledger platform was piloted on ScotPac’s asset finance offering and has been a hit with business owners and brokers, achieving a 90% reduction in application turnaround time and a 300% growth in new business volume in the past 12 months.
Trade Ledger Founder and CEO Martin McCann said with 30 years’ cashflow lending experience, and huge ambition, ScotPac is the ideal partner to shape the emergence of data-driven lending in Australia and New Zealand.
The award-winning Trade Ledger is a Sydney start-up that now has more than 130 staff mainly in the UK and Australia and is expanding rapidly around the global with clients including some of the world’s biggest banks and business lenders.
“Our technology and business data insight, paired with business finance experts like ScotPac, is accelerating and transforming business finance – focusing in particular on the SME and mid-market lending experience, unlocking economic growth with better lending products. The partnership demonstrates how effectively our platform can help a lender grow their business,” McCann said.
“Trade Ledger’s platform goes beyond Open Banking. Our ability to match a lender’s customers with the right services and bring new propositions to market quickly is key to our relationship with ScotPac and transforms how business finance can be accessed.”
Using data and tech to reimagine world of lending for SMEs
The Trade Ledger partnership will completely digitise the front door to every channel and product for ScotPac, with supercharged and secure digital processes that don’t hold business owners back when they are looking for funding, Sutton said.
“The investment in cutting-edge technology is part of our ‘best of both worlds’ approach of providing business owners with a quick, easy digital decision on whether we can fund them, while preserving the deep, relationship-based funding reputation we’ve built since the 1980s.
“It provides ScotPac clients and introducers with the technology and speed of a fintech, giving each business more control and visibility over their funding deals, but unlike fully online lenders we remain able to handle complex transactions.”
He said the partnership with Trade Ledger is an important tech initiative, one of several planned for ScotPac, who have invested heavily in technology and expanded their product offering and executive team.
This is driving ScotPac’s transformation from what has been for more than 30 years primarily a debtor finance business, to become a significant leader in working capital lending in Australia and New Zealand.
“Even with great digital experiences, businesses want and need flexibility – they don’t want to deal with a lender that is a ‘one size fits all’ sausage factory,” Sutton said.
“ScotPac’s investment in technology is allowing us to make nimble decisions to quickly understand each business and make an accurate call on funding.
“ScotPac can handle complex requests to get deals done, and really partner with clients, rather than just make algorithm-based digital decisions about whether or not to fund them.”
