An interview with Martin Mccann, CEO of Trade Ledger
In the ‘fishing with…’ series, we spend a little time getting to know some of the amazing start-ups that choose to call Fishburners home.
This week we sat down with CEO Martin Mccann to find out more about his start-up Trade Ledger following his recent winning presentation to Fishburners’ Pitch Night.
Congrats on your recent win. Can you tell us a little about Trade Ledger… what’s your elevator pitch?
Sure thing! The problem we are solving in a nutshell is — growth businesses can’t access the capital they need.
The current cash flow solutions in the marketplace tend to be designed around the funders’ restraints and requirements rather than the customers’ requirements. Credit can therefore be hard to access for otherwise worthy businesses.
So, Trade Ledger is a credit financing platform — we provide credit assessment analytics and loan transaction services for business loans. Or without the jargon… we assess the financial health of businesses that need to borrow money, and connect them with appropriate loan providers.
We are a pure technology company, not a finance company ourselves. So while we provide services to connect loan requirements with loan providers, we don’t write the loans.
Because it’s a digital-only platform, we will only accept customers who can give us electronic access to their supply chain, procurement and invoicing data. We use these data to develop a risk profile of their business, based on things like how likely we believe they are to get paid in the future.
It’s actually pretty exciting, and to my knowledge this is something that never been done before. There’s a lot of technology and data science that’s gone into it to enable this.
With credit financing, it’s essential to understand what your customer’s debtor is doing downstream. With these new, better datasets we can decrease risk and improve the product to give a better user experience.
Can you give me an example?
A typical example would be a customer realises they have a financial gap they need to cover. Typically it might be somewhere between 20 to 60 days which they need to fund. They can go onto our website and give us access to their financial and supply chain information, and the platform will instantly run an assessment.
From this we can instantly give them a credit assessment and risk profile, and if they quality for a loan we offer them real-time access with full transparency on pricing and conditions.
For loan providers, we are a complete packaged service. They have pre-agreed risk profiles, target customer profiles, and loan terms and conditions which we build into and execute in our marketplace. It’s a complete credit analytics and loan transaction platform.
Tell me about you and your team?
Right now there’s me, and a group of advisors; including a financial services advisor who runs his own financial services company and an advisory CTO.
We are finalising some job offers with developers for us to take the next step in developing the Trade Ledger platform — I’m actually right in the midst of bringing in a development team here at Fishburners at the moment.
What inspired you to start a start-up?
My passion is about applying technology to solve specific problems in the marketplace.
I was previously running a software division for a large enterprise software company. I could see the rate of change in the marketplace was quicker than what was going on in our business. And we weren’t necessarily focused on fixing customers’ actual problems.
Our software focused on solving the world’s biggest supply chain management solutions. That’s where I got an understanding of that data and what the processes look like.
Reading the market signals from the supply chain are really what makes Trade Ledger unique. Being able to actually transform those into inputs that can help us make credit assessments is something that has not been done effectively before.
What have you been doing recently? And what’s next for you?
It took me about four months to get the business model right, and I’ve been through a number of iterations. Not quite ‘pivots’ but certainly clarifications and refinements before pulling the trigger on development.
At the minute, we’re just beyond the testing and experimenting stage. I’m confident that where we’ve landed is something useful to industry. Next is building the platform and getting customers on board. We expect to get beyond MVP and have a product in the market by the end of 2016.
What’s the ask right now / what are you looking for?
We’re looking for some ‘test’ customers to run our assessment software against. People with SaaS products for example, who are happy to have us run our analytics model against their financial and supply chain data. In return, they’ll get is a very detailed financial analysis of their business, and potentially an invite to our beta program.
This is a pure play technology business. And it’s a global business. So we’re interested in talking to people anywhere who want to get involved in the early stages of an interesting enterprise and financial systems platform.
The great thing is it’s really scalable really quickly. I expect us to be in five countries by the time we’re three years old.
When did you join Fishburners? And how has Fishburners helped you?
Well, I’m not very good at working from home full-time. I needed to network and find like-minded co-conspirators for the business. Networking in a start-up space was important to me. And an environment where I could bounce around ideas around people who are doing interesting start-ups as well. Fishburners gave me that and more.
It’s got a really good vibe. It’s a nice place to work and concentrate, and gives me fresh ideas from outside the industries I’ve previously been exposed to. And I got some really good, quality thinking time here to try.
For more…
Check out Trade Ledger and sign up for updates at tradeledger.io. And connect with Martin Mccann on Twitter.
Fishburners is Australia’s largest start-up space, dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs. Find out more about Fishburners at fishburners.org, and for more you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Interested in Fishburners? Check us out at our next Friday Pitches. RSVP at our Meetup page.
