Co-founder and director, James Shattock, explains how the start-up aims to pick up the pace once it secures seed funding.

From the first round of Tech Invest four short years ago to now, 19 of the presenting companies have raised funding, two floated on AIM and two have been acquired. GrowthBusiness presents the top 13 Tech Innovators of the year.

Monuva – a snapshot

PACE Financial Group (PFG) is a limited company, which has launched Monuva as the brand through which it can deploy its latest payments capability.

The parent company has an annual turnover of over £2,000,000 with £67,000 in profit

PFG processes over 5,000 transactions per year, and is a member of leading FinTech incubator, Level 39.

Based in: Greater London

Founded in: 2009

No. of employees: 1

Presenting at Tech Invest: James Shattock, co-founder and director

James Shattock has over 15 years of business development experience within the foreign exchange and property fund sales industries. He set up Monuva’s parent company, PACE, in 2009, and has been running it since.

Products

• Monuva provides SMEs with a cash management account to collect and manage their customer payments
• Monuva is designed to solve two problems for SMEs: late payment and cashflow management
• Monuva makes it as easy as possible for SMEs to get paid by providing an array of payment options for their customers within a single account
• The tool also aims to increase awareness among SMEs on their short-term cashflow position and how they can remain liquid
• This includes payment processing, supply-chain management, e-invoicing, FX, debtor management, etc.
• Monuva offers the service over a globally networked community of corporate and private multi-currency accounts where users can connect, interact and transact instantly at practically zero cost

Recent technology

• Whilst Monuva is likely to be an ever-evolving platform, the first iteration has been designed and developed, and will be rolled out to PFG’s existing clients upon funding
• Monuva has been built as a web application to run on Microsoft’s IIS servers. Each tier of the system will use standard architectural design patterns

Recent milestones

• Client Hilton Grand Vacations successfully reduced invoice delinquency by 7 per cent by using the platform at one of their Italian resorts (worth over €40,000)
• The platform has been recognised as a “technology of outstanding potential” and accepted on to the UKTI’s Global Entrepreneur Programme
• PFG has expanded its processing turnover by 25 per cent in 2015

Upcoming milestones

• PFG aims to secure seed funding to launch the Monuva platform
• It will be integrating the software into Xero, Crunch and other leading cloud accounting platforms
• Hilton in the US is currently looking at using the Monuva platform in order to achieve the same reduction in invoice delinquency as in Europe which would unlock millions of Pounds in extra payments for them each year
• The company aims to migrate existing clients into the new Monuva platform within three months of its launch

Alliances

PFG has existing relationships with:

• Lloyds Bank
• Lloyds Cardnet
• Saxo Bank & Saxo payments
• Sagepay

Investors

Monuva is currently seeking funding