Duedil Blog

Today’s blog features a Q&A with Charles Delingpole, director and co-founder of MarketInvoice. A fellow top-20 startup, MarketInvoice was set up to help small businesses maintain a healthy cash flow by creating a marketplace for invoices which are then bid on by investors. We caught up with Charles to find out how Duedil helps MarketInvoice to provide services for other small businesses.

 

 

What is MarketInvoice, and what does your day-to-day work involve?
MarketInvoice channels capital to small and medium sized companies by allowing them to selectively sell outstanding invoices to a network of investors. For instance, if a company is carrying out work for Tesco, they have to pay for their raw materials in advance of doing the work. When the work is complete, Tesco will take 90 days (the industry standard) to pay them. To cover their own costs, the small business will have to finance this cash flow gap. So, rather than waiting the full 90 days to get paid, they can simply sell this invoice in the marketplace and get paid immediately.As part of this process, we have to diligence potential sellers on the platform. We also need to analyse potential debtors on the platform, to see which top level holding company a subsidiary is related to.

How has Duedil benefited your work?
We like to gather as much information as possible on potential sellers on the platform, so our team conducts extensive diligence checks prior to any trades on the platform. Duedil is very helpful in this regard as it pulls together a large group of information sources into a single place. Thus it saves time and reduces any risk of error in finding information. Clearly this does not mitigate the requirement to fully analyse all of the materials that can be sourced, but in terms of the time saved and ease of aggregating a series of information sources, it is invaluable.

What specific information do you use Duedil to seek out?
Every piece of information is useful to us. As a financial platform, all the normal elements are critical – fraud screening, credit risk analysis, background checks. Most importantly, fraud is always a risk, and information on past activities is crucial in allowing us to have a holistic picture of a new company. Knowing a person’s past can give us a much better idea of their likelihood of honouring payment contracts.

What kind of entities do you look up?
We focus on two entities: sellers and debtors. Sellers are typically anything from start-ups to companies with very significant turnover, across all industries. Debtors are typically the subsidiaries of large, multinational corporations. Something we’ve found particularly useful in terms of understanding the subsidiaries mentioned on invoices is the Group Graph feature on Duedil’s company profiles. Since sellers directly invoice a subsidiary of the debtor, we need to determine the debtor’s ultimate parent company, as this is where the credit risk lies. The Group Graphs feature means that in one click we can determine the ultimate owner of a company that is trading, and get a visualisation of the chains of companies that lead to the top level holding company.

What pieces of information on company/director profiles are most useful to you?
Often in smaller companies the critical element are the people and their track record. Clearly any indication of previous insolvencies, burned creditors or previous failures is very problematic. We are a platform for growth companies to finance expansion rather than for companies to delay insolvency, so we take a director’s track record very seriously.

Which features are the most beneficial for you?
For me, the most useful feature is the director search. Searching for directors via Companies House is not a compelling proposition. Therefore, it’s very useful to see a summary of each director’s history and previous companies. In particular, potentially fraudulent directors may try to disguise a track record by altering details; however, this is made more difficult when you have a powerful director search at your disposal.

Anything else?
Great to see that Duedil are always releasing new features and innovating!

Jaspar

Jaspar is a copywriter and one of the newest members of the Duedil team. He studied Economics and is interested in finding new ways for people to use Duedil - from entrepreneurs and investors to academics and journalists. Duedil is the world’s largest free database of company information. Using data gathered from a variety of sources, including Companies House, Duedil presents business owners, startups, venture capitalists, and the otherwise curious with key insight into any company in the UK and Ireland.