Barclays has invested £3mn into fintech company Trade Ledger, as part of the bank’s plans to drive the growth of its working capital offering.

‍Established in 2016 by CEO Martin McCann, Trade Ledger’s platform supports banks and non-bank lenders to provide credit to SMEs and mid-market corporates by consolidating the information they require to make decisions.

The partnership, which includes a three-year technology deal between the two sides, will see Barclays implement Trade Ledger’s offering for end-to-end credit management automation. Through Trade Ledger’s APIs, Barclays will collect data from its clients’ accounting platforms to support products such as invoice discounting, asset-based lending and selected debtor finance.

The bank says the tie-up will eliminate time-consuming and labour-intensive manual processes and enable it to deliver fast, easy access to working capital for corporate clients.

“Businesses need access to reliable, flexible finance now more than ever,” says James Binns, Barclays’ global head of trade and working capital. “Investing in and implementing the Trade Ledger platform will allow us to make lending decisions faster and more efficiently, using real-time data drawn from a rich variety of sources, and powerful workflows. This drives faster time-to-money, reducing the cost of funding in supply chains, which has huge benefits for our corporate banking clients and the communities they support.”

The investment by Barclays into Trade Ledger is the culmination of several years of collaboration between the two sides, says McCann. “Our history with Barclays goes back to 2018 when we won the Barclays Open Innovation Challenge and, from then on, we have worked with the bank’s leadership team to identify areas of the bank where our technology could be applied to deliver transformational value to lending processes.”