Spenda: A year in review

What a year 2020 has been. We all had specific hopes and aspirations for the year and as we know, it’s turned out to be a very different outcome for everyone. Two words that sum up 2020 are uncertain and unpredictable, and while it’s been a tough year for business in general, we’ve decided to take a quick trip down memory lane and look back at the positives, the happy moments, and what we achieved for our customers.

Our People: Driving innovation in business payments

Let’s start with our people, after all the success we’ve had comes down to our hard working team. One of the biggest changes to our Spenda life was that we made the switch to a virtual working environment. As a tech company, we are fortunate that virtual working is possible for us.

Our core business functions continued to operate as usual during the switch to a virtual workforce and it seemed staff weren’t just adapting to the new work conditions but thriving. Our team saw a significant increase in motivation, focus, discipline and concentration. In fact, 80% of staff revealed that their productivity had increased, so for the foreseeable future, our virtual setup will be here to stay.

The switch to virtual means we’re also able to attract top talent from across the world, regardless of physical location.

From a growth perspective, despite operational and cash flow issues for businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team still managed to grow by 40%. This growth included the hire of a new CFO, Richard Jarvis, who will help propel us into our next phase of growth within the digital business payments sector.

We’re also pleased to say that over 30% of our team is made up of women who work across our tech and development teams, in marketing, sales and HR, and make up nearly 30% of the senior management team.

Our Product: Delivering smart payment solutions and digital tools for businesses

In February, Spenda launched onto the App Store signifying a key milestone in making the customer onboarding process a lot easier. Joining Spenda is now as simple as downloading the app, following the wizard prompts to connect the accounting systems, uploading stock and being ready to trade in a matter of minutes.

Across the year, our software solutions also received some important upgrades and new features as we continue to work to make business solutions that help increase efficiency and productivity for our customers, and in the first half of 2020, we started offering payment solutions.

In May we launched our Merchant Services solution offering integrated payments with our POS system and eCommerce. Then came the launch of the SpendaCollect solution in July. This was one of our biggest achievements as we successfully transitioned towards B2B digital payments – a goal we had since Spenda was born.

Today, our Payments Stack allows businesses to take payments, collect debt, set up pay-later plans and get access to working capital. And with our latest Workflow Payments concept – otherwise referred to as the ‘Uberification’ of payments – businesses can receive instant payment once a job is complete, thereby reducing the need to chase debt and creating certainty in debt recovery for businesses.

What’s more, we also entered into two very exciting agreements that take our payments offering to the next level, a Business Payments Solution Provider (BPSP) agreement and Business Payment Aggregator (BPA) Agreement. It means that businesses using Spenda can now pay their suppliers via a credit card transaction even when the supplier doesn’t accept card payments. This not only gives our customers more payment options and flexibility, but it’s a game-changing solution for B2B payments that will help businesses better manage their cash flow – and in effect, sell more!

The payment technology we have created, coupled with our strong SaaS products, allows us to focus on the B2B market, and we are in a prime position for building this market share as we continue to evolve and bring new and innovative solutions to our customers.

A year of Spenda: the recap

So it’s onwards and upwards for us here at Spenda. Our never-ending purpose is to deliver our customers with new and innovative solutions that not only impact the future of business payments, but improve how businesses trade, and get paid.

If you’d like to be a part of the Spenda story, head on over to our Careers Page and get in touch with us.