Miami-headquartered fintech company Calculum has launched a new data-as-a-service (DaaS) platform that aims to help companies negotiate better payment terms with trading partners and boost their cash flow.

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the platform analyses various aspects of a company’s buying counterparty or supplier, before providing insights on how the firm can improve its payment terms.

Factors assessed by the cloud-based platform include the financial strength and credit risk score of a company, the size of a company, a user’s leverage, as well as the country and sector a firm operates in.

Companies can also see on the platform how they fare against competitors on a host of data points, such as payment terms, days payable outstanding, days sales outstanding, and overall cash conversion cycle.

Spend data is imported onto the platform by users through APIs, or by sending Excel or CSV files via a secured data feed, with the Ada platform then working to remove duplicate entries before running analysis.

At the same, as Calculum’s CEO Oliver Belin tells GTR, the solution will also use data from external sources. To date, he notes that the platform already has complete data points on roughly 650,000 companies globally.

The platform is targeted at Fortune 500 or mid-market companies engaged in the use of working capital solutions, in particular supply chain finance (SCF).

Calculum notes in a release that the platform “steps away from manual work and gut-based term negotiation in the supply chain finance industry, unlocking millions in working capital and generating free cash flow”.

On the funding side, the solution targets banks, private equity institutions, as well as fintechs and advisory firms that provide treasury and supply chain services to corporate clients.

The Ada platform’s first client since going live is a “major Asian bank,” Belin says.

Pointing to major lenders in the trade finance space, he notes: “Unfortunately these banks often target the same top corporate names… then at the end, it’s always a fight for who has the best relationships, who has the lowest pricing, or the biggest capacity.”

“Through our tool, they can differentiate their offering and provide fresh insights to their client. Or, when the bank sets up financing, we can provide additional insights on how to roll out these financing programmes successfully and efficiently,” he adds.

The move comes roughly a year after Calculum was incorporated as a company in Delaware, with the firm having spent the past 12 months fine-tuning the Ada platform and running market surveys with chief procurement officers, treasurers and other parties involved in SCF.

Belin will now take on his role at Calculum full time, after leaving his post as chief marketing officer at open account trade finance platform Marco Polo.

According to the Calculum site, the new platform is named after English mathematician Ada Lovelace, known for her work on the earliest computer, the Analytical Engine.