We are excited to announce that Deloitte has invested in the tomato pay team to help us further our mission to revolutionise the financial services experience small businesses get today.
In a pioneering move, Deloitte has invested in our award-winning AI-driven, API-platform for financial institutions so that financial innovators such as banks, insurers, PSPs and card issuers can better serve their small businesses clients. Furthermore, Deloitte will support tomato pays (formerly known as Fractal) mission to democratise the small business banking ecosystem.
It’s no secret that small businesses face many challenges when it comes to banking and financing. Small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking has been a segment that the banking industry has, at times, found challenging to serve due to its variety, complexity and unique requirements. As such, it’s reported that the worldwide SME funding gap has hit £4 trillion.
We are thrilled about our partnership and subsequent investment from Deloitte. They have been intricately involved in, and supportive of, the growth of FinTech in the UK. We always look for investors who believe in the same values we hold, and who will support our mission. Furthermore, they understand the vital role that the major financial institutions play within the British economy by supporting SMEs.
Why is Deloitte investing in tomato pay?
Deloitte works with some of the world’s biggest banks and best FinTech firms. They also invest in promising FinTech start-ups addressing part of the financial services value chain.
Deloitte has been working with us closely for some time, to help our clients transform the SME banking offering across the world. Deloitte have also integrated tomato pays (formerly Fractal) AI intelligence API into Propel by Deloitte’s accounting software. Amid this, Deloitte believed that with the rise of Open Banking, the logical next step was to provide further support with an investment.
Reflecting Deloitte’s desire to back the people behind FinTech start-ups rather than the technology they develop, Louise Brett, Deloitte’s FinTech leader states “You don’t invest in technology, you invest in teams. We worked with tomato pay CEO Nicholas Heller and his leadership team for 12 months and we believed in them and saw the potential.”
How will Deloitte’s investment help tomato pay?
As residents of Deloitte’s FinTech lab in central London, the investment will also allow Deloitte to draw on its network, expertise and experience as a corporate venture capital (CVC) firm by providing support, mentoring and client introductions to us. It will also help tomato pay to:
- accelerate our growth,
- build the team to deliver our offering to the international market,
- react swiftly to the growing market-pull for solutions solving the challenges SMEs face, and
- increase liquidity within the underserved SME segment (with the current UK funding gap standing at £59 billion).
SMEs are crucial to economies both for wealth creation and for the people they employ. Productivity growth is essential for promoting long-term economic growth and higher living standards. It is therefore vital that SMEs are given the best chance of succeeding with the best banking services they can access.
tomato pay CEO and Co-founder Nicholas Heller states: “It is a rarity to work so closely with such an established business, and still be given the freedom to build the products we truly believe will revolutionise the banking experience for small businesses, who are at the core of everything we do at Fractal. Our ambition is to be a truly global business, and this new investment from Deloitte confirms that we are on the right track to achieve what will be an incredible feat with a partner who has a lot of confidence in both our team and mission”.
Deloitte’s FinTech leader Louise Brett reaffirms “We’re fortunate that we work closely with the Fractal Labs team. Seeing the swift progression they have achieved in such a short amount of time gives us the confidence we need to invest in not just a platform redefining the SME financial services offering, but the incredible, close-knit team who work extremely hard to build and market it. We truly believe in the CEO’s vision and the team’s ability to pull off such a feat across so many markets. We’re thrilled that they have taken up residence in our FinTech lab, and to have Fractal Labs as the first FinTech on our new portfolio”.
An introduction to tomato pay (formerly known as Fractal)
tomato pay empowers financial innovators to enhance the data required to make better financial-risk decisions, and use intelligent targeting to remove the friction from customer engagement.
Through a platform for financial services (FS) providers, focused on the SME segment, we are fundamentally changing the small business banking experience by reinventing the SME financial services one API at a time. On the day that PSD2 went live, we were the first start-up to get authorisation by Open Banking.
By combining data and automation, tomato pay unlocks an entirely new value exchange between SMEs and financial innovators by aggregating and enhancing the data required to make financial risk decisions, while using intelligent targeting to dramatically improve customer engagement.
The platform empowers our partners to better service SMEs while creating new revenue opportunities; ultimately providing SMEs with better access to the financial services needed to grow and thrive.
Our platform provides intelligence to enable an entirely new customer value exchange through an API-suite which includes three products:
- Data Aggregation (Bank, accounting, budget, payments, credit scores, public registries data).
- Data Intelligence (Cash flow forecasting, transaction auto-categorisation, insights - bills, invoices, customers and suppliers).
- Targeting Engine (Cross-sell products, Relationship Manager insights, product potential).
This enables new customer propositions such as lending, cash management, payments and insurance.
In doing so, our platform connects the underlying loan assets in the real economy to the capital markets, by digitising loans after origination. In doing so, we can help money managers create an optimal portfolio based on risk at an individual loan level.
We have expanded our roster of influential clients to all corners of the globe, including the UK, Republic of Ireland, Finland, The Netherlands, with plans to expand to South America and Australia.
To achieve all of this, Fractal Labs has an expert team of 25+ behavioural scientists, data scientists and engineers.
Further information
- Find out more about tomato pay.
- Find out more about Deloitte Ventures, Deloitte’s team co-creating and co-investing with leading corporations to build new partnerships, platforms and products.
