Upflow, a French startup we’ve been covering for quite a while, originally focused on managing outstanding invoices. The company is now announcing a shift in its strategy to become a B2B payment platform with its own payment gateway to complement its accounts receivable automation solution.
Like many software-as-a-service products, Upflow started by building a central hub specifically designed for one job in particular: CFOs. From the Upflow dashboards, CFOs and finance teams could see all their company’s invoices, track payments, communicate with team members, and send reminders to clients.
It integrates nicely with other financial tools and services to automatically import data from those third-party services. And a tool like Upflow can be particularly important as many tech companies struggle to raise their next funding round and want to improve their cash balance.
But that was just the first step in a bigger roadmap.
“Basically, my vision has always been that the real problem is payment methods,” Upflow co-founder and CEO Alexandre Louisy (pictured above) told TechCrunch. “Today, when you pay in a store, you pay with your phone. When you pay for your Spotify subscription or your Amazon subscription, you don’t even think about how you pay.”
“But when you look at B2B payments, the way you pay today hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. And for us, that’s why people struggle with late payments. The thing I’m really trying to fight against is the idea that late payments are linked to bad payers.“
According to him, around 90% of B2B payments still happen offline in the U.S. It’s still mostly paper checks. In Europe, it’s a different story as companies have adopted bank transfers. But transfers “are completely unstructured and require manual reconciliation,” Louisy said.