This piece in Yahoo Finance speaks to a 2021 startup out of San Francisco named Slope, which is described as a firm that enables any B2B platform to offer Buy Now, Pay Later by handling the lending, underwriting, and debt collection. So, this is another offering in the growing space of BNPL, although applying a somewhat different twist on the approach by focusing on working capital (not necessarily sales) and the cross-border aspect of B2B e-commerce globally, which is growing at a rapid pace, aided in some respects by the pandemic.
‘Prior to the global pandemic, suppliers were extending net terms of 30 days to pay, but at that scale, it is hard to build up credit for small businesses, Murata told TechCrunch…
“Then with the global pandemic, the pace at which business-to-business payment was moving online was accelerating,” Murata told TechCrunch. “We wanted to bring it online at checkout and empower businesses by making access to capital easy.”…
Businesses can get approved in seconds and begin offering the installments. At checkout, customers can choose the payment terms that work for them. Slope manages the lending, underwriting and any debt collection, and will pay out to the business once the product or service ships.’
The piece goes on to discuss the seed funding of $8 million based on early growth rates for the firm, which apparently had clients lined up before the product was actually built, suggesting highly pent-up demand. When targeting the small business merchant space, access to cash is a primary selling point, and there is no better time to do so than in uncertain times, especially when the latest gen tech can enable it at scale. If one thinks of this as another form of receivables finance, then it becomes more of a differentiator. With merchant sign-ups across multiple foreign markets for the months-old firm, it looks like something bearing a closer look.
‘Don Stalter, partner at Global Founders Capital, said Slope’s growth was “impressive from the start, and one of the fastest-growing companies we have seen globally, at its stage and leanness of the team.”…
Businesses have gone to banks for business loans, but it was a “janky process,” and anyone who can improve it at a rate of five times with technology will be a major disrupter, and if they can do it 100 time, they will revolutionize it, he added…
He believes Deng and Lawrence can do this by taking that big B2B payments market and attacking it with artificial intelligence and new technology that is going to improve opportunities for businesses.’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
