International business lender TP24 has continued to provide SMEs with flexible credit solutions. We sit down with Adam Lane, managing director of TP24, to unpack why brokers should consider recommending clients to the lender and the company’s goals for 2024.
Q. TP24 is an unusual name. What does it mean?
The origins of the acronym TP stand for: ‘To Progress’. And the 24 signals 24 hours a day!
It’s really trying to encapsulate that we are a business that specialises in (and gets incredibly passionate) about helping businesses progress.
Q. What does TP24 specialise in?
We are helping businesses leverage an asset class that is often overlooked: the account receivables ledger.
But the TP24 CreditLine product works totally differently to most invoice finance solutions. Most of the industry have what they call a true sale model, where the invoice is purchased by the financier, and then it’s a combination of the financier and or the business owner chasing that invoice if it isn’t paid.
We do things fundamentally different here at TP24. We allow customers to get leverage on their receivables book, without having to sell it to us. So all of the account receivables and the collection of those invoices reside with their businesses, as does the bank account that those invoices go into. We operate our product from the premise of trust rather than control. We oversee businesses through links to their accounting platform.
Our CreditLine solution goes from $200,000 all the way up to $5 million and [it’s] a line of credit leveraging an SME’s receivables.
Q. What kind of SMEs are best suited to your product?
We’re looking for businesses of all shapes and sizes on the basis that they generate invoices as a function of their normal course of business. When we look at our portfolio and the types of opportunities that we’re seeing, the heartland remains consistent. It’s labour-hire businesses, businesses that make things (manufacturing businesses), and businesses that sell things (wholesale businesses).
We’re looking to work with businesses that have been around for two years or more. In our view, two years gives you a good sense and a good trend for the business.
Q. What makes TP24 unique?
Our willingness and ability to fund overseas invoices as well as domestic invoices. With our global presence, we have the ability to fund export businesses, so we see a disproportionate number of export businesses in our portfolio than you might see in a traditional invoice finance provider.
Plus, we don’t obligate customers to change where their invoices get paid into. We don’t have segment accounts, control accounts, or trust accounts, which brings a lot of complication into the invoice payment process.
We also don’t feel the need to have lock-in contracts that obligate customers to deal with us for long periods of time.
We’ve got transparent fees and believe that customers should be able to calculate what the cost of their solution is. So, we have a very simple structure where we have an interest rate and we have a line fee and that’s it.
We don’t penalise customers if they have more invoices than they forecast by having drawdown fees or discount rates. We’ll fund export invoices or overseas invoices as readily as we will domestic invoices.
Q. What are TP24's goals for this year?
We are focused on helping as many SMEs as possible unlock the growth potential in their business. It’s a year of scale for TP24. This year is all about getting out there in market and having lots of great conversations with commercial brokers to see if we can help their customers. We’ve recently renewed our partnership with the aggregator AFG. We’ve got another aggregator announcement to make imminently.
If you’re a commercial broker and active, you should have had a face-to-face conversation with one of the TP24 team before the end of the year. We’re active, we’re excited, and we’re looking to partner with as many SMEs as possible.
Tune in to hear more!
You can find out more about TP24 and the intricacies of invoice finance in The Adviser’s In Focus podcast, here:
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