Cloud nine for UK start-up AccessPay with £1m Barclays backing
The AccessPay team in Manchester, UK
Barclays is providing £1 million in funding to UK-based AccessPay to support its growth and further develop their relationship.
Access Systems (trading as AccessPay) 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 and Direct Debit. It is delivered through one portal, with no “manual intervention” required.
The company plans to use the additional funds to “accelerate organic growth” in 2016/17 and is the first in Manchester (UK) to benefit from Barclays’ new “innovation finance” product targeted towards “high-growth and innovative” businesses.
Anish Kapoor, CEO at AccessPay, says: “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.”
Read the small print
To help start-ups grow, Barclays’ funding offers companies additional financing at “more favourable rates”.
Loans are backed by a guarantee from the European Investment Fund (EIF), with financial backing from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.
Horizon 2020 is the “biggest EU research and innovation programme ever” with nearly €80 billion of funding available over seven years – from 2014 to 2020.
Through this programme, Barclays is able to provide €140 million finance to “innovative” companies in the UK over the next two years.
In case of emergency…
Last year, Barclays and AccessPay launched a “first of its kind” cloud-based contingency payment service banking access channel.
The new service allows Barclays’ corporate customers to access an additional channel for managing payments if their primary channel is unavailable. This doesn’t involve a fax (in case you were wondering).
Clients can start payments with a laptop separate to their “primary infrastructure” via the new “Contingency Payment Access” solution.
Barclays says customers don’t pay any extra for this new service, except for their normal electronic banking service fees.
