Company: BankiFi
Founder: Mark Hartley
Website: https://www.bankifi.com
About BankiFi
BankiFi is a technology platform designed to make business banking better. The company enables banks and financial institutions to provide a set of integrated services – accounting, invoicing, and payments – designed around the processes that customers use to run their business. In doing so, BankiFi helps banks to become customer centric, helping to increase revenues and reduce costs while allowing business customers to thrive.
Alongside this drive to put banks back at the heart of business, BankiFi is on a mission to support small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) around the world and to improve the level of service they receive from their banking partners. Specifically, the company aims to provide SMEs with new tools that help them deal with their business finance management more efficiently and to speed up the process of making and receiving payments.
STRIVING TOWARDS IMPORTANT GOALS
That’s an important goal, especially as research shows SMEs in the UK are owed an average of £250k in late payments. It’s even worse in the US, where mid-sized businesses are owed $304,066 in late payments on average. When these two stats are combined with research that shows 50% of small businesses are operating with fewer than 15 cash buffer days then you begin to see the scale of the problem BankiFi is trying to fix.
Thankfully, through a series of innovative financial products, BankiFi is beginning to make a real difference in this area. The company’s solution is helping SMEs to get paid in one to two days on average. Importantly, that’s one to two days from the date an invoice was created, not the due date. Therefore, people using the company’s service are getting paid significantly earlier than what they’ve come to expect.
CONTINUED SUCCESS & DEVELOPMENT
Since launch, BankiFi has partnered with major banks, including Axiom Bank, The Co-Operative Bank, TSB and is also a registered Visa Partner. More recently, BankiFi has launched in the United States, where it’s already seeing great success. This rapid expansion is propelling the company towards its goal of helping two million small businesses by 2024 across the multiple regions that it operates in.
Both new regulation and advances in tech have lowered the barriers to entry in banking and finance, enabling new entrants to join the market. It was hoped that this democratization would improve provisions for certain customer segments, including SMEs, but this has not been the case. Unfortunately, too many businesses are still underserved by new entrants and traditional, long-standing financial institutions.
However, by embedding banks within business workflows through simple-to-deploy financial tools, BankiFi looks to address that challenge. From automatic invoice reconciliation to enabling quicker invoice payments, BankiFi is helping to put more financial control back into the hands of SMEs, allowing them to focus more time and efforts on core business activities, which generate revenues.
