TEG’s SmartPay surpasses £478m as early payment reaches thousands of UK haulage businesses
Awarded Best Initiative in Embedded Finance at the PAY360 Awards 2026, SmartPay, TEG‘s payment and settlement platform for UK freight, has moved close to half a billion pounds into the accounts of UK hauliers.
SmartPay was built to solve a structural problem in UK road freight, a market worth an estimated £39.3bn a year. Standard payment cycles run from 30 to 90 days, while average haulage profitability margins sit at around 2%. For the thousands of SMEs and sole traders that make up the sector, delayed payment is not an inconvenience. It determines whether they can take on work, pay drivers, cover fuel costs, or survive at all.
SmartPay has processed £478m since launch. Adoption has accelerated, with £418m of that total processed in the last 12 months alone. Lyall Cresswell, CEO and founder of TEG and Trustd, said: “For as long as this industry has existed, the smallest operators have done the work and then waited months to be paid. We set ourselves one test: make it work for the smallest operators, not only the largest. When payment stops holding people back, the whole industry can collaborate more freely. What began as a faster way to get paid is becoming the financial infrastructure this industry has never had.”
For carriers, early payment replaces the wait for their money, with funds available on the day an invoice is approved. They request it from the same dashboard where they accepted the load, without applying to a bank or a separate finance provider.
Nationally, around 40,000 UK businesses use invoice finance or asset-based lending, fewer than 1% of the 5.6 million businesses in the UK. Traditional invoice finance is credit-based, and its minimum thresholds have always excluded the smallest operators. SmartPay finances against the completed booking instead, reaching businesses that have never previously had access to this kind of finance.
With TEG’s Embedded Finance products, payments are made on a non-recourse basis. Carriers are protected from late or unpaid invoices, provided they complete the load and supply proof of delivery. Its proactive credit control flags late payments within days rather than relying on members to report problems, making the platform safer as well as faster.
Sam Wilkinson, chief revenue officer of TEG said: “You cannot safely pay a carrier faster unless you know who they are. The payment itself is rarely the hardest part. The pain point is usually the admin around it, from onboarding a new carrier to verifying who they are and checking their bank details. Every SmartPay transaction runs through verification with TEG’s partner Trustd, so onboarding, verification and payment are part of the same workflow, and speed never comes at the expense of assurance.”
Once a payment is released, funds land in the carrier’s account in under four minutes on average. Remittance and reconciliation happen automatically. Orders are marked as paid, and both sides have a clean audit trail.
This year’s PAY360 Awards, organised by The Payments Association, were judged by more than 70 independent experts from organisations including Mastercard, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest and AWS. In an industry built on long waits, payment, verification and reconciliation have always been separate problems. SmartPay brings them into one system.