Payfor: How a financial specialist company is saving thousands of SMEs from closing
The burgeoning financial crisis plaguing consumers and small businesses, is causing a severe cashflow problem. It’s an extremely worrying picture and, unfortunately, things do not look like they will get better anytime soon.
Luckily, an effective solution is at hand. Finance business, Payfor, represents a growing customer portfolio of SMEs boosting their cashflow with up to 50% more cash in the bank and an 85% invoice collection success rate.
With services ranging from account receivables management to cross-border debt collection and legal recovery, Payfor is the last line of defence for many businesses.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 2 million of the UK’s small businesses had less than three months’ worth of cash left to support their operations. According to the chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, around 10% of those (200,000) were in “serious trouble”, and another 300,000 “have only got weeks left”.
Giles Goodman founded Payfor in 2018. Prior to this, he was in the music industry negotiating record deals for top 40 artists like Robert Miles, Fatboy Slim and Fedde Le Grand. He’s also developed and sold luxury properties in Tel Aviv.
“Before I started Payfor, I did actually have an experience of my own business being owed money. I’ve been in the same position as many business owners, feeling the frustration and despair of trying to recover funds from a company that is on the other side of the world.”
Commenting on the current predicament of businesses facing hardship, Goodman adds: “When doing business, “Cash Is King. Companies need liquid capital to cover overheads and reinvest in growing their business. Right now, so many SMEs are being deprived of this by larger corporations or unreliable clients. With the additional external force of record inflation adding pressure, the cracks are beginning to show.”
According to the ONS, in the UK, the five-year survival rate for businesses born in 2014 is 42.5%. Goodman speculates that a large portion of failed businesses are due to not being able to keep up with chasing payments for the services that they deliver, a problem he vows to fix:
“When starting out in business, it can be crippling to your operations to be owed money. I started Payfor to take away the stress of having to chase payments for services you’ve already delivered. Our core belief is that companies deserve to be paid on time!”.
Payfor provides outsourced Accounts Receivables. It works as a white label service to issue, chase and collect monthly owed invoices. By outsourcing this operation, companies optimise working capital, saving time and resources.
“We actually increased the amount of money that was in our bank account by 50% within the first three months that we took on Giles and Payfor. That’s a huge increase compared to when we had our accounts receivables team that was internal.” says Paolo Zanini, CEO of a video production agency.
Debt collection was where Payfor originally started and still makes up the bulk of its business. Now that the company has grown, this service now follows on seamlessly from the account receivables management and is complemented by a legal recovery service which manages litigation for clients at no extra cost.
