Running a small business isn’t easy, constantly having to maintain a balance between growth and profitability with limited resources. Many Danish SMEs face a number of challenges when it comes to liquidity, for example, only having enough liquidity to cover up to one months expenses at the time. SMEs dealing with larger customers are subjected to harsh, long payment terms, and the average invoice being paid up to 10 days late - a big pain when large orders are being invoiced.
For the owners of these businesses, the needed help with liquidity from traditional financial providers is extremely difficult - with most banks requiring a large amount of trading history, contracts and outdated credit scoring.
Moneyflow was founded in 2018 with the vision to transform the financial industry by experimenting with different financial tools for SMEs inside accounting platforms. In 2019 a key partnership was formed with Visma e-conomic to create a joint strategy on utilising live accounting data to offer automatic and fully digital, instant services. The key goal was to ‘get people paid’. Essentially, moving the payment of invoices from always being in the future to always being instant.
By taking the old financial tool ‘factoring’, Moneyflow created a completely new and fully digital financial offering, which empowers small business owners to get paid instantly, moments after the invoice is sent. Put simply, Moneyflow ‘takes over’ the ownership of the invoice and the associated payment risk, enabling the customer to focus on growing their business and not chasing payments.
The service is fully integrated into Visma E-conomic, the largest accounting platform in Denmark for SMEs. Fully digital onboarding takes only a few minutes for the business owner and complies with all necessary anti-money laundering and KYC procedures. The service is completely free to sign up and the fee is simply subtracted from the total payout of each invoice. An instant offer is given directly on the invoice creation flow, making it a seamless part of their invoicing routine.
Once the offer is accepted and invoice sent, the money is typically in the customers account within two hours. Essentially the only thing that changes is that ‘Moneyflow’ takes over ownership of the invoice and new payment instructions are added to the invoice. In addition, all the accounting is automatically done, so it’s super easy for bookkeepers to handle.
When it comes to following up on payments, Moneyflow has an 80% automatic payment followup process. In the situations where payers haven’t been able to pay the invoice, a dedicated customer service team approaches the payers with a friendly yet firm tone.
Behind the easy and intuitive user experience is a sophisticated credit assessment engine. The engine is constantly evolving with even more advanced credit scoring and machine learning algorithms. Compared to traditional banks, Moneyflow applies a holistic assessment of the companies by gather realtime accounting data and information from public registers and credit scoring agencies.
‘’Straksbetaling’’ went live in e-conomic in April 2020 where it has been gradually introduced and made available to all customers over time. In a market where ‘factoring’ is still a new concept it has exponentially grown in usage month on month and have developed key customers in industries like transportation, wholesale, construction and IT.
The service has attracted over 1300 users that regularly receive instant offers on invoices they make. Each month, the total invoice value being processed is growing by 70%. In the first 8 months after going live, Moneyflow has paid out more than 75 m DKK to Danish SMEs - essentially releasing these funds into the danish economy.
It’s anticipated with this growth rate that Moneyflow will pay out over 100 m DKK a month over the next 12 months. Moneyflow has grown to become 25 employees as of today (April 2021), has raised in excess of 40 m DKK in private funding and has established a debt fund facility of up to 200 m DKK which is provided by large Danish financial institutions.