Trade financing deep tech startup, Trade Ledger, has made it onto the APAC CIOoutlook “Top 25 FinTech Companies 2017” list after just 5 months with its unique digital banking platform for business banks and alternative lenders, who were previously unable to address the challenging SME sector without high expected losses. See our Fintech Spotlight Series note on the firm.
The list recognises promising fintech companies in the Asia-Pacific region that have not only demonstrated the use of technological innovation to solve an urgent and sizeable problem, but who have also shown an ability to commercialise their innovation for rapid adoption and scale.
“Trade Ledger was always intended to be a global end-to-end platform. The working capital problem we are solving is common to businesses and banks everywhere in the world,” said Martin McCann, CEO and Co-Founder of Trade Ledger.
“Finance providers have never been able to accurately leverage quality operational supply chain data to determine business lending risk, due to not having digital data access or suitable technology for credit assessment technology.
“As a result, most of the world’s SMEs are considered too risky for credit, when the truth is actually that credit modelling and underwriting processes are simply designed for multinationals and large corporations, not for our smaller SMEs.
“The unfortunate reality is that despite their smaller size, these SMEs represent an enormous chunk of the global lending opportunity: neglecting this important segment has resulted in a business loan undersupply to the tune of AU$90 billion each year in Australia, and AU$2.7 trillion globally.
“This essentially represents the size of the unaddressed opportunity for any business lenders wishing to use the Trade Ledger technology,” concluded Martin McCann.
Over 500 companies were assessed by the APAC CIOoutlook research team for inclusion in the final 25 fintech companies list.
These companies were all considered to be at the forefront of tackling market challenges and building technologies that greatly benefited other firms in the finance industry.
However, those who made the final cut stood out from their peers in terms of technological innovation, the size and urgency of the problem they solved, and their commercial prowess in bringing their technology to market.
