Global Lending Automation Platform Trade Ledger Announces £1.5m Funding Round Led by Hambro Perks

The world’s first open banking business Lending-as-a-Service platform has completed a £1.5m funding round led by Hambro Perks, the leading UK early-stage venture firm.

Martin-McCann-CEO-Trade-Ledger
Martin McCann CEO Trade Ledger

London, 30 October 2019 – Trade Ledger, the ground-breaking business lending platform, which automates commercial lending processes for global banks and alternative finance providers, today announces strategic investment in a £1.5M round led by Hambro Perks, to further accelerate revenue growth.

Established in 2016 and now operating on three continents, Trade Ledger’s unique lend-tech platform automates all types of digital business finance, helping bank and non-bank business lending organisations alike to fast-track economic growth through process automation and scaling of business credit operations. Trade Ledger uses financial data APIs (often referred to as Open Banking), Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation technologies to enhance or replace old and costly legacy bank systems for origination, credit decisioning, take on and loan management, enabling new cutting-edge working capital solutions for business customers. The resulting new lending solutions can reduce the time-to-cash from 90 days which is the industry average to 4 minutes and are better tailored to the working capital needs of modern high-growth businesses. 

Trade Ledger’s co-founder, Martin McCann, and his team believe that transforming business lending operations through the Trade Ledger Lending Platform is the single biggest area of opportunity for commercial banks and financial services organisations to benefit from Open Banking in the near future. “There is a £1.2 trillion gap in credit that businesses need to optimise growth which is why we created this lend-tech”, explained McCann. “We believe that only by reimagining new types of credit services only possible with this lend-tech, can banks solve this massive business problem profitably and at scale globally. By leveraging open trade data via APIs alongside other enterprise-grade enabling technologies, financial institutions can drive significant operational efficiencies and product innovation within their internal operations and dramatically increase market share.”

“My co-founder Matt and I launched Trade Ledger in 2016 to improve the business customer’s experience in their financial supply chain, by helping banks re-imagine the entire process”, continued Martin McCann. “With the increasing threat of big technology firms like Google, Amazon and Alibaba bridging the gap between traditional financial services and the supply-chain eco-system, incumbent banks and lenders must start thinking about how they remain relevant. Trade Ledger is currently the only true platform in the world that can help them do this at a global scale in the business lending sector.”

George Davies, Partner at Hambro Perks added: “We are delighted to be backing Trade Ledger as Martin, Matt and the Trade Ledger team continue to develop market-leading tech that benefits businesses around the world. Hambro Perks is committed to supporting brilliant founders and teams that are building global businesses, and we believe that Trade Ledger has enormous global potential. We are very excited about Trade Ledger’s rapid growth and to support Martin and Matt as they tackle the barriers that have created such a vast undersupply of working capital for businesses across the globe.”

The Trade Ledger Platform provides a complete innovation layer that masks the clunky traditional corporate business banking environment and delivers an excellent consumer-like experience. Trade Ledger supports compliance with new regulatory requirements through aggregation and normalisation of better credit risk data whilst underpinning the wider commercialisation of open data and adoption of new banking business models to generate new revenue streams. The platform orchestrates value in the lending ecosystem by moving organisations from process-led engagement to an automated data-driven lending model.

About Trade Ledger

Trade Ledger (www.tradeledger.io) is the world’s first open banking lending platform that gives banks the ability to assess business lending risk in real-time. This will enable banks to address the £1.2 trillion of undersupply in trade finance lending globally while providing high-growth companies with the working capital needed to sustain growth.

About Hambro Perks

Hambro Perks (www.hambroperks.com)  is a London based venture firm that backs and builds leading technology companies. Founded by Dominic Perks and Rupert Hambro CBE, Hambro Perks invests at an early stage and helps companies to scale with capital and strategic support. The firm invests from both its permanent capital and Co-Investment EIS Fund that is open to high net worth investors and is soon to launch other funds. Hambro Perks has backed more than 40 businesses such as the digital pharmacy Echo, the geocoding system What3Words, and the Muslim matchmaking app Muzmatch.

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