Kountable is pleased to announce the development of its Treasury Cloud product, a secure, enterprise grade Payment Factory for trade flows involving small and medium enterprises which solves the problems of supply chain visibility and matching, asset backed receivables finance and treasury management for the global supply chain that includes the underbanked and underserved.
Kountable began building the process flows that underpin Kountable Treasury Cloud in 2015 to meet its own treasury needs and the compliance requirements of the investors and lenders supporting its first incarnation as a trade finance business for SMEs in underserved markets. We began our journey by looking for a solution to the funding, sourcing, logistics, trade and currency management challenges facing SMEs attempting to execute on quality contracts with government, NGOs, foundations and large corporations as payers. It was rapidly apparent that this set of challenges, usually attributed to a lack of financial inclusion, were actually the result of a lack of data. In addition to the dearth of credit data in the markets in East Africa where we began proving out our model, the large entities on either side of the SME in the trade, both supplier and end customer, generally use ERP systems, but there was no system of record for the SME-managed part of the trade. Thus, adding a new SME to a transaction involved asking corporate treasurers to blindly finance an unproven supply chain.
Kountable stepped up to solve the data problem to unlock financial opportunity both for SMEs and for the large partners who rely on them by creating a system of record for these types of three-party trades (Seller-SME-Buyer). By partnering with the SME as the purchaser of the goods, Kountable is placed in the middle of the trade where it can see the entire transaction from end to end and design and manage the flows of funds and goods accordingly. To mitigate risk and track and manage the trade efficiently, all the inflows or outflows to suppliers, shippers, customs clearing agents, insurance providers, banks and any other parties or service providers involved in the trade go through Kountable's platform, allowing them to be documented and matched to milestones drawn from verified contracts, P.O.s, bills of lading and other trade related documentation.
Kountable's Treasury Cloud has been a collaboration with the hundreds of SME platform users, nearly 400 global suppliers from nearly 30 countries, global telcos, healthcare brands, and the governments of Rwanda and Kenya who have transacted on Kountable's platform. We stood in the shoes of Ministers of Finance and National Treasuries to finance SME suppliers and international procurement. As a result we are prepared to serve corporate customers, additional governments, multilateral institutions and global NGOs and look forward to rolling this capability out to additional markets in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and, finally, after much anticipation, North America.
Treasury Cloud allows portfolios of SME-executed projects to meet enterprise-level needs for:
Treasury Cloud makes business which involves working with SMEs at scale for local execution in challenging markets approachable for multinationals. With the launch of Treasury Cloud, and Kountable's ability to engage quality, vetted, qualified SMEs and support their success, MNCs can focus on the overall opportunity rather than rejecting otherwise attractive projects simply because they lack the data to evaluate or monitor the SME-involved portion.
