Barclays boosts AccessPay with £1 million loan

Barclays has cemented their strong working relationship with AccessPay, by providing a £1m loan to help the innovative Manchester fintech company explore further growth opportunities.

Access Systems (UK) Ltd, trading as AccessPay (accesspay.com), provides a cloud based connectivity layer between a business’s finance systems, their banks and all of the major UK and International payment networks such as BACS, SWIFT, SEPA, Faster Payments & Direct Debit. Delivered through one easy to use portal, manual intervention is removed thus providing a significant time and cost saving as well as better management information and better security.

The company plans to use the additional funds to accelerate organic growth in 2016/17 and is the first in Manchester to benefit from Barclays’ new ‘Innovation Finance’ product targeted towards high-growth and innovative businesses. The fund is providing innovative companies with additional financing at more favourable rates as part of the bank’s commitment to supporting high growth businesses in the UK. The loan will be backed by a guarantee of the EIF, enabled by the InnovFin initiative with financial backing from the Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Anish Kapoor, Chief Executive Officer at AccessPay commented: “We explored a number of options to grow our business in 2016, having the luxury of significant venture capital backing and strong existing cash flow. We felt that the local Barclays team in Manchester demonstrated from the start that they fully understood our market proposition and drive to make business payments as easy as possible, recognising the potential of the business to achieve rapid growth. They also saw the huge opportunity to deepen the existing working relationship between the two companies. We are very excited to be going on this journey with Barclays.”

David Parr, Relationship Director at Barclays in Manchester commented: “As part of our plans at Barclays to enhance our high-growth offering to the market, we are extending our lending capabilities and credit appetite in the technology sector for ambitious, entrepreneurial businesses like AccessPay.

“In addition to our existing venture loan, we have launched Innovation Finance; this enables us to offer greater support to the market by allowing earlier lending to the most promising of high-growth companies and preferential pricing for all qualifying high-growth companies, allowing more funds to be re-invested into the business.”

On the agreement with the EIF, Karl Nolson, Head of Debt Finance at Barclays commented: “Helping innovative companies to grow is at the heart of what we do. Barclays is uniquely placed to support high growth businesses and entrepreneurs, from start-up, to scale up, to IPO. Lending to SMEs is at the core of our business and our joint-venture agreement with the EIF is now another way that our business customers can access funding when they need it most. The UK economy needs innovation and innovators need finance. In offering Innovation Finance it enables us to provide additional funding solutions, supporting more businesses in the UK with the potential to be future blue-chip companies.”

This deal follows Barclays announcement that it has signed an agreement with The European Investment Fund (EIF) to finance lending to innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and small mid-caps in the UK. This transaction benefits from the support of the European Fund for Strategic Investments which will be deployed by the European Commission and the EIB Group.

The new agreement allows Barclays to provide EUR 140m (GBP 100m) finance to innovative companies in the UK over the next 2 years.