Marketlend Academy: How are your loans different from other SME lines of credit?

Lending to SMEs to support sustainable growth is what Marketlend CEO and Founder Leo Tyndall is passionate about, and he wants his company to lead the way as a responsible organisation that treats lines of credit with care and delivers transparency. Click to video to here more or scroll down for a transcript of his latest chat.

So when you say giving them a line of credit, and pay them straight, no, we don’t, we pay their suppliers. So, we pay their suppliers, and we pay their suppliers based on invoice of the verified and checked, and those invoices are then presented to us, and then we pay that supplier, and then when they actually get the goods, they then sell them, and obviously then they pay us in the 90 days after that.

So, and even if our line of credit, uninsured which is a product, which is a little bit similar to like a loan, but it’s a limit, we pay the supplier. So, we allow them to pay suppliers, or services, and what we provide is a line of credit. It’s a little bit similar to an overdraft: we give them a line of credit, it’s renewable, and reviewable every 12 months, they pay it on time, investors are happy, now roll the facility over, and they can keep it going. And, the point being, is that they can then run their business knowing that if they get a big order, they’ve got this line of credit they can use, if they don’t have many orders, they can close the line down, or can reduce it, so there’s that flexibility there.

And that’s not what they’ve got when they go and get personal loans, or I call them personal loans, but S and E loans, ’cause they’re just pure loans.

Yeah, correct. yeah, and the other reason why we do that, is that we don’t really like the idea of giving people pure cash, because it could be used for alcoholism, gambling, and a few other, we’ve seen one before, where they present an invoice and we went to pay it, but before we paid the invoice, we looked at these bank statements and noticed that he was actually gambling. So, we said, “Look, we don’t think we’re gonna pay that.” Because, obviously, we look at their bank statements, and he was probably gonna use the cash that we paid for the goods, with his own income so he could do some gambling or whatever he was gonna do.

So, we look at their bank statements, so we have a number of steps, so, first thing we do is we actually look at their ability to repay the debt for debt servicing ratios, and they’re financials, after their financials we give their bank statements, we then review their bank statements and look at the entries on the bank statement. We have a team member whose only job is to look at those bank statements, and what he’ll do is, he’s a risk officer, and he’ll identify any unusual activity, but also the ability to repay, because the financials may not match the bank statement as well.

And then in this case, what we did was we saw that there was a number of gambling sites that were being paid, and even though we weren’t providing him the cash, we identified that that was a risk, and we didn’t want to lend####  to him.