Nectarine Credit set to shake up neglected credit application process

Everyone hates the bureaucracy of dealing with financial institutions – especially, it turns out, the people working in them. Much of this frustration stems from the archaic systems that still scaffold basic tasks such as credit checks. For the most part, these processes have remained the same for decades, requiring complicated hoop-jumping and arbitrary regulations that still rely in some cases – believe it or not – on fax machines. Fax. Machines.

Alex Armitage, CEO of Victoria’s Nectarine Credit, is no stranger to navigating financial red tape. A fourth-time entrepreneur with two successful exits, Armitage drew from his own experience when launching his newest venture: one that might lack the sexiness of a metaverse startup or blockchain project, but which has genuine potential to transform business-to-business interactions. Nectarine Credit set out to solve one of the most complicated processes in finance: helping buyers apply for credit with a manufacturer or supplier, and helping manufacturers or suppliers decide whether a buyer is credit-worthy. 

Here’s the gist. In the first step of onboarding, a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, say, will want to determine that the buyer of those pills deserves credit. Checking the buyer’s financial standing de-risks any credit given by the pill-maker, as it can be confident that it will get its money. Trouble is, the application process for credit is cumbersome for both sides. PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and other documents have to be emailed back and forth between the credit-provider – the seller of goods – and the credit-seeker, the buyer of goods. This issue is compounded by the need for vendor references. In order to determine whether the buyer of the pills is worthy of credit, the pharmaceutical manufacturer will ask for confirmation from other companies that bills have previously been paid by the buyer. This manual process can take anywhere from days, to weeks, to months. 

Nectarine Credit, however, has digitized and automated the workflow. In doing so, it’s reduced bank verifications and other credit-check processes down to seconds.

“Our platform is a central repository – a central dashboard – for all the players: the credit-provider (who's the seller of goods), the credit-seeker (who's the buyer of goods), and the vendor references,” Armitage tells Victoria Tech Journal. “[It allows them] all to access the data in a secure way, all in one central dashboard. I have more examples than I can count of customers or businesses that were not given a credit decision for weeks and months, because the process was broken. And we have solved that problem.”

Today, Nectarine Credit has announced that it’s improving its offerings further by partnering with Creditsafe. Founded in 1997, Creditsafe provides online company credit scores and credit report information, and – like Nectarine – is a young and nimble organization that is well-placed to disrupt long-held and outdated financial processes. The partnership allows users of the Nectarine Credit platform to be hand-delivered a decision about whether to give a company credit, and how much.

“We’ve been sort of informal partners with them [Creditsafe] and working on a partnership for probably about a year now,” says Armitage. “A gap, if you will, in our platform was credit reporting. And Creditsafe has an amazing amount of data, and that data has a lot of depth to it. And so they have an amazing repository for our clients to use to help them with credit-decisioning. Existing and new Creditsafe clients can access Creditsafe reporting, and their entire scoring data, directly on our platform.”

Nectarine Credit’s solution comes at a good time. With COVID prompting the “great resignation,” employees are becoming increasingly picky about what tasks they’re asked to perform at work. As Armitage knows from experience, credit teams – anywhere from five to 50 people, including accountants, sales, finance, and other departments – currently have to participate in arduous systems of verification. By speeding up the process, Nectarine Credit automates the drudgery, freeing up employees to work on projects that are more fulfilling at the same time as allowing cash to flow faster between businesses.

“We did not build this product in a vacuum,” says Armitage. “We built this because our contract manufacturers and distributors and suppliers were slow, and not handling credit in an effective manner. At the end of the day, this is all about cost savings, and reducing risk and credit exposure. The reason this has never been done before is because the incumbents are stuck in their ways. And we always come at this with a beginner's mind, and are always looking to find solutions to even the very smallest problem.

“Our goal is to give our clients confidence to make better decisions to reduce risk and drive growth,” he says. “We believe it’s time for a better credit-decisioning platform.”