Solving micro business late payments

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There are 5.5M sole traders and micro businesses in the UK making up 99% of all private companies and 60% of all employees. Even prior to the pandemic micros were waiting an average of 56 days to get paid even though their invoicing terms are typically 30 days or less. According to the Federation of Small Business, this causes up to 50,000 businesses to fail annually. Since Covid the average days to get paid has leapt to 71 putting even more pressure on this beleaguered sector.Our research has shown us that micros are very reluctant to borrow, but have been forced into taking bounce back loans, overdrafts and increased credit card debt, exacerbating the existing late payments challenge. Increased debt is now the key area of focus as many of those businesses would not have been eligible for loans under normal circumstances and are likely to have significant challenges in servicing them and paying them down. Facilitating collections to prevent significant write-offs will certainly be in line with government policy.Our project is to specifically help micros in solving the late payment challenge by utilising technology. At its core is the fundamental principle of "choice". We aim to reach as many micros as possible by making our service accessible from any:1. personal or business current account,2. accounting package, and3. payment typewith a mobile-first strategy reflecting the needs of time-poor business owners to have access from wherever and whenever they need to.Prior to Covid, working capital finance has been the entry point to solving the liquidity problem caused by late payments, but with extra debt on the balance sheet the emphasis needs to shift to collecting payments with working capital finance only needed as a secondary option.Our initiative will expand our collections service, Incom£ing, to include direct debit and card payments to help businesses automate their collections as well as increase our sales and marketing efforts to onboard as many micros as is possible in the shortest period of time.The benefits to micros will be clearly measurable:1. We will help micros reduce collection times.2. We will ensure that personal current account holders can use their existing account to run their sole trading business, reducing their operating costs.3. We will ensure that every micro has access to our service from any bank account accounting package, and collections using any payment type.