Digital banking platform start-up, Trade Ledger, has been named the “Ashurst Fintech Start-up of the Year” after expanding into the UK market and signing up a series of major deals in just one year.
Trade Ledger is the world’s first open digital banking platform that gives banks and other business lenders the ability to assess business lending risk in real time. This will enable these lenders 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.
The award goes each year to a fintech start-up “that has disrupted the financial services sector with new and innovative services, creating competition and transforming the way we experience financial services”.
Trade Ledger has done this by being the first corporate lending platform in the world to automate the entire credit assessment process, assess SME supply chain data in real-time, and calculate risk down to the individual invoice.
This allows banks and other business lenders to tap into the AU$90 billion of unmet business credit demand in Australia, and US$2.1 trillion globally.
“As the global economy transitions towards smaller, high-growth businesses – our all-important start-up and innovation ecosystem – business lenders have an obligation to learn how to supply working capital desperately needed by these businesses of the future,” said Martin McCann, CEO and Co-Founder of Trade Ledger.
“Australian banks and business lenders also face risks on several fronts. On the one hand, they need to improve both their cost/income ratio and their capital efficiencies within this segment that is traditionally considered as high risk. On the other, they are facing increased competition from technology behemoths such as Amazon, Tencent, and eBay, who are all threatening to use their hordes of data to enter financial services.
“The Trade Ledger platform equips these lenders with the same degree of technological proficiency as these massive tech firms, while arming them with the tools needed to meet our booming innovation ecosystem’s need for credit,” concluded Martin McCann.
This is the third year the FinTech Awards have been running, and the FinTech Awards owner, Glen Frost, was particularly impressed with both the quality and quantity of this year’s applications.
Speaking on the night, Glen Frost said: “The 3rd Annual FinTech Awards recognise and reward the innovators and the risk takers. To be recognised by your peers for your innovation and entrepreneurial spirit will sustain you through the tough times, it will motivate you, and it will show your customers, investors and staff, that you’ve got what it takes.
“I congratulate Martin McCann, and his team at Trade Ledger, on winning the Ashurst FinTech Startup of the Year.”
The keynote guest speaker for the evening was the Hon Scott Morrison, MP, Treasurer, who told the crowd that he was relying on the fintech community to ensure the success of his policy on comprehensive credit reporting.
