From startup to scaleup, how Trade Ledger established and expanded their capabilities

Trade Ledger achieve remarkable growth with Vacuumlabs as their augmentation partner

Headquartered in London, Trade Ledger specialize in lending technology—or LendTech— and provide digital solutions for the banking and alternative lending sectors. They are the creators of the world’s first Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) open platform that gives banks and alternative lenders the ability to assess business lending risk in real-time and automate processes for multiple products, globally, with bank-grade security. As their business started growing, Trade Ledger wanted to scale aggressively over a short period of time. They ultimately opted for resource augmentation by partnering with Vacuumlabs to expand their capabilities.

Flexible team
of expert engineers

Vacuumlabs team worked on product development from day 1 of collaboration

Increased
delivery bandwidth

Unlocking economic growth and social mobility

Trade Ledger’s research shows that 57% of small and medium enterprise (SME) loan applications are either abandoned or declined. Often, the reason for rejection is the unavailability of data to profile the risk. This has led to a funding gap of 1.5-5.4 trillion USD worldwide. When SMEs are unable to get the required working capital or investment capital, they are unable to reach their full potential. To address this socio-economic issue, Trade Ledger creates and provides lenders the technology and data capabilities to create data-backed digital customer experiences that address salient needs enabling efficient lending processes.

The company’s Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) platform is addressing the underserved SME market and transforming it with a powerful data-driven lending process. The platform allows banks and alternative lenders to efficiently carry out a credit risk assessment of SMEs seeking loans, and to digitize and automate key processes. This reduces the time required for loan application and approval from several weeks to as little as a few minutes. Trade Ledger started off in Australia and moved their headquarters to the UK in 2018. After setting up in London, the business grew rapidly and the internal technology team needed support. Understanding that growing the Trade Ledger team organically would be time-consuming and challenging, they decided to opt for a resource augmentation partner in the product and engineering area.

Expanding portfolio, expanding resources

As they were scaling, Trade Ledger’s team were also looking to expand their existing LaaS portfolio within a short period of time. The start-up required additional, highly skilled talent who could join in to accelerate and expand their capability. It was hard to find engineers with the right skills across web and cloud-based technology stacks, with experience in React, Kotlin and microservices architecture. Trade Ledger wanted a partner who would be comfortable working with their high enterprise standards, and with a team that could easily flex up or down based on resources needed. Vacuumlabs ticked these boxes and offered much more. “Vacuumlabs had a track record of successfully creating and deploying digital banking products for some very prestigious clients,” said Martin McCann, Founder and CEO of Trade Ledger.

Vacuumlabs teams were working on the same technology stacks and skills as us, which was extremely useful. It was an important qualification criterion for us because we wanted to use their domain expertise and technology stack experience.

Martin McCann

Founder & CEO of Trade Ledger

Covering more ground with highly experienced engineers

Vacuumlabs got off to a running start, helping Trade Ledger release new product features within a short timeframe. Their team of seasoned developers required no training, bringing with them expertise and experience while filling process gaps. With Trade Ledger’s unique understanding of electronic invoicing and Vacuumlabs’ skilled engineers, the teams were able to boost product development.

We’re coordinating with Trade Ledger squads across different time zones and continue to provide them with high quality, agile tech teams. Our engineers collaborated with the in-house Product Owners and SCRUM managers to provide the technical capabilities and support for fast, high quality product development.

Ondrej Tokar

Head of Project Management

Achieving more, faster

The partnership started with Vacuumlabs’ engineers working side-by-side with Trade Ledger’s in-house team. With the extra resources provided by Vacuumlabs, Trade Ledger were able to focus their efforts on expanding capability, accelerating product development, and scaling their existing product portfolio. The arrangement enabled Trade Ledger to grow much more rapidly in a shorter time frame, with Vacuumlabs scaling their workforce alongside them. The two companies found amazing synergies not just in tech skills but also in working styles.

“When something’s raised, it’s always done with the best intentions, and it is treated with respect and seriousness so we can resolve it amicably together,” shared McCann. “And that’s how our partnership also grew stronger. We now have strong and open communication with each other.”

Trade Ledger had the vision and the core expertise in enterprise technology development, while Vaccumlabs had skilled resources and provided augmentation. “We think of Vacuumlabs as a capacity burst function to absorb our big spikes in growth,” said McCann. Together, the two teams made the vision of accelerating and transforming business finance a reality. “Vacuumlabs is the secret sauce that enabled us to scale with limited resources at the outset,” he adds.

Our relationship with Vacuumlabs has been effective from the start. We integrated like a single team, working through product development side-by-side.

Martin McCann

Founder & CEO of Trade Ledger

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Let’s shape your ideas
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and build our cooperation from there.
 
You can also contact us via email contact@vacuumlabs.com

By submitting this form you agree to the processing of your personal data according to our  Privacy Policy.

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