Concordia Magazine 2025

Building Tranch When my co-founder and I started Tranch in the pre-AI world we wanted to play to our ‘edge’. Having worked in fintech we saw a clear problem that we knew how to solve. We also knew that we wanted to support businesses and avoid the regulatory hurdles and expensive marketing that can go with building a direct-to-consumer business. We launched Tranch to solve a simple but serious issue for businesses: large invoices create cash-flow problems for finance teams. Having been a Chief Financial Officer I knew that first hand. We started as a B2B ‘buy-now-pay later’ platform — effectively Klarna for businesses — and later honed our focus on the legal sector in the USA, where demand was strongest. Our business evolved beyond our original vision into a full-stack invoice management and payment business for some of the world’s largest law firms. Running a transatlantic business with a lending component is certainly not for the faint-hearted. One of the hardest things is knowing whether you really have the right product for the market or whether you simply think you have. That uncertainty keeps you listening to customers and constantly innovating. Balancing innovation with commercial reality is another constant tension. In enterprise sales, customers often have fixed opinions or focus on short-term needs rather

than transformational change. Gut instinct is incredibly important, but wrong moves cost time and money. We learnt, for instance, that we had expanded too slowly into other forms of payment, especially card payments. We realised that customers did not always need credit; they simply wanted a faster way to pay. In the USA about 30% of business payments are still made by cheque, compared with 0.2% in the UK: we certainly leveraged our British roots to innovate in America. The journey has certainly had its highs and lows. One of the toughest moments was discovering that a client had gone AWOL with $300,000 of outstanding loans to us. I went to four different police precincts in New York trying to report the matter, only to be met each time with shrugs. The highs are always great, whether a successful deal closed, a feature shipped or a payment-volume milestone. However, I always tried to temper my excitement to ensure I didn’t swing from euphoria to disappointment too often! In enterprise sales, customers often have fixed opinions or focus on short-term needs rather than transformational change. Gut instinct is incredibly important, but wrong moves cost time and money.

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