A few days back, Barclays, a global financial services company that provides various financial products and services worldwide, invested in London-based fintech startup MarketInvoice. It’s worth mentioning that in 2018, Barclays grabbed an equity stake in MarketInvoice and launched the service to its large small and medium enterprise client base.
Right now, the UK company has announced a partnership with Nimbla, a pioneer of single invoice insurance. For the uninitiated, Nimbla is a digital insurance platform designed to protect small and medium-sized businesses against insolvent and late-paying customers.
With this investment, Barclays’ one million SME clients will have the opportunity to take out insurance against individual invoices, rather than the whole book.
Flemming Bengtsen, Founder & CEO of Nimbla, said:
We are excited to be working with Barclays to introduce Nimbla to its customers. All too often, it is SMEs that feel the pain when other businesses fold. They are least equipped to absorb the losses and don’t have access to the tools that larger corporates do.
With Nimbla, customers can insure a single invoice from as little as £6, compared to insuring a whole book, which typically starts at around £5,000.
Bengtsen added:
Nimbla, however, is as much about the opportunity as the risk. We are focused on helping SMEs grow as well as protecting their business.
Notably, Nimbla graduated from the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars in 2018, having built a new digital platform to give business customers a flexible and affordable way to insure individual invoices, helping protect them from insolvency and late payments.
Furthermore, Barclays’ relationship managers will be introducing the product to their SME clients in the North East, Cumbria, South East London, and Kent, before a full roll-out later in the year. The product is available nationally to High Growth clients looking to scale their business quickly.
Ian Rand, CEO of Barclays Business Banking, said:
Working with industry disruptors is key to our strategy going forward as we look to innovate and provide the very best products on the market to our one million small business customers.
Traditionally, trade credit insurance requires businesses to insure their entire book, but this can be very complex, expensive, and inflexible, therefore making it unsuitable for SMEs.
Our UK-wide network of relationship managers will be introducing our clients to Nimbla over the next few months, and we look forward to seeing how the pilot progresses.
Main image credits: Nimbla
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