Platform Black breaks through £60m barrier in less than two years
Platform Black has announced that it has now provided over £60m of finance to UK SMEs, a significant milestone for the company within just two years of its inception.
Platform Black enables SMEs to select the invoices they want to finance and set the maximum price they are prepared to pay – investors then compete to drive down the cost of finance the SME pays. It empowers British businesses to control their own cashflow by turning invoices into working capital at a price they set or less.
Louise Beaumont, co-founder, commented: “This is a major development in the relatively short life of our company. In less than two years, we have traded over £60m which is an incredible achievement for Platform Black. It illustrates that our flexibility, creativity and transparency is delivering exactly what our customers want, especially in the wake of the tide of demand for business funding outside the traditional high street banking sector.”
The company, which allows businesses to auction invoices online with investors advancing up to 90% of the invoice value, held its first auction at the end of June 2012. Within the first six months, Platform Black had traded around £1m of invoices. The company has traded around £25m of invoices in the last six months – including a single invoice of £1m.
Louise continued: “Not only is our business model creating a whole new financial service for SMEs, we are also establishing a new asset class of short term debt for investors. We are proving to be a totally flexible and absolutely complementary form of finance for SMEs throughout the UK.”
