Today, Australia’s largest retail floor covering specialist, Carpet Court and Australian Fintech, Spenda announce a partnership which will see the rollout of Spenda’s bespoke software and payments platform across the Carpet Court member network of more than 200 franchise stores to deliver business efficiencies through software and payment services.

The software solution will supplant existing time-consuming manual processes. Replacing them with real-time access to accounts so member stores and head office can easily see their inflows and expenses, raise disputes, and better manage their cash flow.

With more than 53% of Business-to-Business transactions in Australia paid late (Xero 2019), transforming payment processes with digital technology not only helps businesses get paid faster but makes them more resilient and future-proofs them from economic challenges.

The rollout follows a successful pilot phase, which included the onboarding of over 20% of the franchise network. Both parties have now signed an agreement to facilitate the rollout of the Carpet Court Spenda Platform to all 205 Carpet Court stores by mid 2023. 

There is also scope to expand the provision of services to include a working capital facility to be made available to Carpet Court members to provide increased payment flexibility and extended credit services.

Accessing working capital through FinTech’s is a growing trend for SME businesses. According to a recent World Bank report, SME’s globally have unmet finance needs to the value of USD 5.2 trillion a year. To address this need, Spenda has recently secured a $50m debt warehouse facility which will be used to advance individual stores to pay their invoices to Carpet Court’s head office.

As a Fintech, Spenda combines lending and software, assessing transactional data to gain a clear view of a business’s underlying cash flow, which allows for more secure lending and payment offers to be issued.

The combination of the services provisioned by Spenda will generate significant uplift for Carpet Court’s Head Office, which will enable them to better predict their cash flow and working capital requirements.

Commenting on the partnership, Mark Hogan, Chief Financial Officer of Carpet Court, said: “The Spenda platform enables us to leverage best-in-class integration capabilities for efficient end-to-end payment processing, whilst offering member services added solutions such as point of sale and working capital management facilities to save cost and drive member growth.”

Spenda’s Managing Director Adrian Floate added: “Partnering with a national flooring retailer like Carpet Court provides Spenda the opportunity to showcase the maturity of its software, lending and payments stack. What we are solving for Carpet Court is industry agnostic. The desire to provide extended and flexible payment terms, e-Invoicing integration and greater cash flow visibility penetrates the whole supply chain.

The overwhelmingly positive feedback we have had from member stores demonstrate that when businesses implement a collections and payments software solution that provides mutual benefits to both businesses in a transaction, not only is there quick uptake and immediate return on investment to the business implementing the solution, but trading relationships are also almost instantly improved.”