MarketInvoice, which provides an alternative solution to SME finance, has traded £115 million as it celebrates its third birthday this week.

 Founded in February 2011, MarketInvoice states that it is “Europe’s first online platform allowing SMEs to quickly and flexibly sell their invoices to raise working capital – a new and revolutionary take on traditional invoice financing.”

This week marks its third anniversary since its first completion and the platform has £115,225,500 of invoices traded.

The company completed £70 million of this figure in the last 12 months alone, and lending is still booming in the New Year.

In January 2014, MarketInvoice traded £12.2 million worth of invoices, which is an increase of £10 million compared to the same month 12 months previously.

The online platform is a new take on traditional factoring and invoice discounting, which are “no longer really suitable to a large proportion of people”.

Ari Last, Head of Partnership Development for MarketInvoice said: “We’re very flexible and transparent; when the invoice auction goes live, the full amount is bought by multiple sophisticated investors, who buy out the invoice almost immediately.”

The platform has a global-investor base and investors can pick and choose from invoices, and money can be in the businesses’ accounts in 90 minutes. Its clients are exporting to over 30 countries and 40 per cent of the volume traded has been for export.

The pool of private investors (Hedge Funds, Asset Managers, Family Offices and High Net Worth individuals) buy the invoices and advance funds upfront within 24 hours. As of August, the UK Government is also buying invoices with the company, further strengthening the certainty of funding for the businesses on our platform.

The Government has invested £5 million in the platform as part of the Business Finance Partnership scheme.

The alternative finance provider reached its milestone of funding £100 million to UK businesses in December. The feat was achieved much quicker than planned - the company had been growing more than 20 per cent month-on-month the whole of 2013.

MarketInvoice works with SMEs as well as larger companies and helps a diverse range of businesses, from those in construction, to others in manufacturing and engineering. However, the businesses’ debtor/s must be blue chip companies.Ari told B&C that the company, which currently has a team of 20, is the “fastest new-age growing online business” in the UK. He added that MarketInvoice does not have a rigid centralised box-ticking system and can take a commercial view on deals. The outfit is looking to grow extensively this year.

Ari added: “95 per cent of UK SMEs have never funded against their invoices before either because they weren’t able to or didn’t want to. This is now no longer the case, and with 75 per cent of our customers never having used invoice finance before, what we’re seeing is that our solution is taking this niche form of funding into the mainstream.”

The average client sells 10 invoices a year through the platform but some SMEs trade up to 20 times a month. This frequency of usage, coupled with individual invoice sizes now reaching £1 million, is seeing a customer on average put more than £500,000 through the platform a year.

The average invoice size is £80,000 and a £1 million invoice was sold in 3 minutes.

MarketInvoice, a Patron of the NACFB, is determined to boost its relationship with the broker community and, as a result, relaunched its introducer scheme offering competitive lifetime revenue-share terms and has also launched a Partner Portal, allowing its introducers to monitor and track the activity of all their referrals in real time.

Invoice finance has always been seen as funding of the last resort, but this platform is changing the sector for the good with its transparent model.

This year, MarketInvoice plans to do £25 million to £30 million a month through the platform and wants to double the amount of SMEs it has supported with working capital, from 510 to 1,000 businesses.