Can A.I. Solve Your Business’s Cash Flow Issues?
Fintech’s rise has only accelerated in 2018. New, exciting companies using technology to solve finance’s longstanding issues seem to pop up regularly – and some even manage to live up to the hype and lofty claims. Now Fluidly, a year-old fintech company headquartered in London, says their innovative “intelligent cashflow management software,” which offers a modern spin on financial forecasting using the power of AI, is the gamechanger that SMEs need – and raised a £5 million Series A round to continue building it.
Fluidly co-founder and CEO Caroline Plumb became acutely familiar with the pain points of cashflow management at her successful first business, Freshminds. “I was sick and tired of the all too familiar stress of not knowing when I was going to be paid, whilst attempting to monitor our cash flow for the upcoming months with a large degree of uncertainty, all alongside my day to day responsibilities,” Plumb told XU Magazine.
Plumb called that process “very manual, very time consuming and out of date.” Sometimes even the “godsend” of a good accountant wasn’t enough when she needed accurate information on demand “in order to make quick decisions with more certainty.” With that problem in mind, Fluidly was born.
The company’s touted “real-time cashflow forecasting software” eliminates the need for modeling via artificial intelligence. According to Fluidly’s website, the software “connects to [a user’s] accounting package and uses the data in it to automatically build a detailed baseline cash flow forecast” in real-time. “Fluidly is then able to access the transaction-level bank and accounting data and it uses this data to automatically forecast future cash flows by predicting when invoices will arrive, get paid or other payments will be made,” Plumb explained to Techcrunch.
Fluidly has enjoyed rapid growth over their first year – according to stories announcing the deal, the company says it now works with nine of the UK’s top 20 accounting firms and has developed partnerships “with various cloud accounting software providers.” A portion of funds from the latest investment round will be used to build new features and integrate Fluidly with additional platforms. “We’ll be adding smart alerts, scenarios and suggested actions if you might be running into cashflow difficulty,” Plumb told Techcrunch. “We’ll also start to scale our sales and marketing team.”
Whether ‘intelligent cash’ is the future of cashflow management is impossible to predict. But AI’s growth in leaps and bounds (and fintech’s ability to integrate it into its products) has shown extremely promising returns in 2018. Fluidly’s steep upward trajectory over the course of a year seems to be the latest evidence that more innovation is sure to come.
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Financial analyst and market blogger with expertise in equity research, fundamental analysis, and macroeconomic trends. I regularly publish coverage on individual stocks, ETFs, and sector developments — combining rigorous financial analysis with clear, engaging writing for a broad investment audience.
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