Barclays announces new fintech partnership with Nimbla

In a high street banking first, Barclays has announced a partnership with Nimbla, a pioneer of single invoice insurance.

Barclays’ one million SME clients will have the opportunity to benefit from the partnership, with the new ability to take out insurance against individual invoices, rather than the whole book.

With Nimbla, customers can insure a single invoice from as little as £6, compared to insuring a whole book which typically starts at around £5,000. Nimbla’s solution provides simplicity and speed and aims to disrupt a market where a sale typically takes days or weeks as opposed to a few minutes.

Nimbla graduated from the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars in 2018, having built a new digital platform to give business customers a flexible and affordable way to insure individual invoices, helping protect them from insolvency and late payments.

As part of the partnership, Barclays’ relationship managers will be introducing the product to their SME clients in the North East, Cumbria, South East London and Kent, before a full roll-out later in the year. The product is available nationally to High Growth clients looking to scale their business quickly.

Flemming Bengtsen, Founder & CEO of Nimbla said: “We are excited to be working with Barclays to introduce Nimbla to their customers. All too often it is SMEs that feel the pain when other businesses fold. They are least equipped to absorb the losses and don’t have access to the tools that larger corporates do.

“Nimbla however, is as much about the opportunity as the risk. We are focused on helping SMEs grow as well as protecting their business. A survey by Barclaycard suggested 58% of smaller businesses turn away new business as they did not feel comfortable offering credit terms. That is holding them back.

“Barclays recognises that we are offering their customers the tools to take on risk, safe in the knowledge they will be paid.”

Ian Rand, CEO of Barclays Business Banking said: “Working with industry disruptors is key to our strategy going forward as we look to innovate and provide the very best products on the market to our one million small business customers.

“It’s great to be working even more closely with Nimbla, one of the entrepreneurial success stories of our Barclays Techstars Fintech accelerator programme.

“Confidence is the key to business growth, and single invoice insurance will give our SME clients who may have a small number of large invoices critical to their growth, the peace of mind that whatever may happen they will be paid for their services.

“Traditionally, trade credit insurance requires businesses to insure their entire book, but this can be very complex, expensive and inflexible, therefore making it unsuitable for SMEs.

“Our UK-wide network of relationship managers will be introducing our clients to Nimbla over the next few months, and we look forward to seeing how the pilot progresses.”