Growfin targeting the $125t global B2B payments market

By Edlyn Cardoza

SaaS FinTech platform Growfin has recently launched globally to transform how finance functions in B2B companies track and collect payments from their customers.

With early customers across different sizes and geographies consisting of enterprise customers like Intercom, high performing unicorns like Darwinbox and fast-growing startups like Airmeet Locus.sh, Whatfix and MonetizeMore, Growfin sees strong product-market signals, helping over $300 million of booked revenue be converted into cash.

Getting paid and getting paid on time have been challenges as long as commerce has existed for businesses of all sizes. Managing receivables and collecting payments are often complex and compound as companies grow.

“Collecting payments in B2B companies involve not only finance but also other stakeholders like sales and customer success, all of whom end up capturing payment information in their own formats and systems. This creates vacuums of information and countless workflow layers leading to a lot of inefficiencies in collecting payments,” says Aravind Gopalan, co-founder and CEO of Growfin.ai.

Today, a lot of this is managed over emails, spreadsheets, ERPs, payment gateways, Slack conversations, and meetings. Hence, stakeholders do not have real-time visibility into invoice payment statuses and AR balances.

“Instead of having to rely on disparate systems that do not talk to each other, we have created an easy-to-use no-code platform that invites everyone concerned with an invoice payment, including the customer, to collaborate in one place where they all see the same information and help solve payment issues faster. This collaboration-first approach will offer better efficiencies, greater transparency and build trusted relationships between customers and businesses towards collecting B2B payments faster,” says Aravind.

After talking to a focus group of 300+ finance professionals in 2021 to understand their pain points in collecting AR during, before and after the pandemic, Aravind says that the existing systems or vendors are not solving this problem the right way. “We learned that these skilled professionals were being hampered by existing archaic systems and were spending a lot of resources on managing receivables with poor efficiency. Their current ERP, payment systems or the legacy vendors were not helping solve their problems, as these platforms were simply tools to record and process invoice creation, deliver invoices and provide payment options,” added Aravind.

Despite the growth in modern CRM systems for sales and innovation in FinTech payment solutions, little has been done to manage the business of collecting B2B payments. Growfin is squarely aimed at solving this problem by creating transparency in the payments journey with a one-stop solution.

“Growfin’s AI-powered system aims to bring archaic accounts receivables systems to the 21st century by providing access to real-time cash flow visibility and predictability for the CFO office. Businesses deserve to be able to improve cash-flow efficiency and forecast better by tracking payment statuses of their invoices in real-time. Aravind and Raja are well placed to solve these problems and we’re excited to back their journey,” says Anurag, Partner at 3one4 Capital.

Growfin’s Health Score can help enterprises proactively identify delays in payments and begin a dialogue in advance to ensure payments arrive on time.

Each customer’s payment behaviour and procurement process vary, requiring a personalized approach. While Growfin’s Collections Strategy allows you to automate this at scale, the built-in Collections CRM enable each stakeholder to manage customer relationships at an individual level.

B2B payments account for $25 trillion of money flows versus $4 trillion in B2C transactions in the US alone. There have been untold innovations in B2C for payments but little for its much larger cousin, B2B. Due to the lack of innovation, B2B enterprises use B2C payment solutions to solve their pointed problems, which are not purpose-built for managing receivables.

“We believe that this new way of collaboration-first approach is the need of the hour for B2B enterprises to erase payment woes in a remote, digital-first world,” signs off Aravind.