With YayPay, Invoice Collection Becomes Easier, Faster, Better

Meet YayPay, a London-based startup launching today on stage at Disrupt London in our Startup Battlefield competition. YayPay lets you automatically collect payments from your customers. And it works like magic.

“We’re trying to give small businesses what big businesses have,” co-founder and CEO Anthony Venus told me before the event. “Usually you pay about $60,000 for an accounts receivable staff.”

Slow payments can be dangerous for a small company, which is why it’s important to get paid on time. The typical small business is getting paid in 60 to 70 days. But big businesses usually get paid in 30 days.

“YayPay takes all our users’ invoices and we bundle them into statements. The idea behind the statement is that you get a collection of invoices, and when you remind customers that they need to pay, you remind then once,” co-founder and president Saul Frank told me.

Seven days before the due date, the startup sends an email reminder with a payment link so that customers can pay in minutes. Two days before the due date, YayPay sends a second email and a text message. Four days after the due date, YayPay picks up the phone and calls for these late payments. In YayPay’s experience, once clients make a commitment and say over the phone they are going to pay, it speeds things up quite dramatically.

Everything is completely customizable. You can disable text messages for big clients for example, as you wouldn’t send a text message to a big company. YayPay handles payments, gives you insights about unpaid invoices and more.

Most of the time, companies simply forget. But sometimes, you’re dealing with bad payers. In the future, as YayPay is collecting data about all these companies, it could make predictions and recommendations. There’s a big data play down the road.

YayPay uses a software-as-a-service model and targets small and medium businesses that make less than $5 million in revenue and don’t have any incentive to pay a dedicated accountant. Plans start at $29 per month.

I know many companies that nearly died because a big customer didn’t want to pay. YayPay’s product is promising for these companies that want to grow but need to make sure they cover all their bases.

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Questions & Answers

Judges: Alexandre Barbosa, Sonali DeRycker, Charles Hudson and Mattias Ljungman

Question: What’s the piece that you’re doing and that I couldn’t do without you?
Answer: The majority of payments in the U.S. are made through checks.

Q: Are you planning any integration with procurement platforms and ERP?
A: That’s planned, that’s further down the path.

Q: Are you going to have a vertical strategy when it comes to SMEs?
A: There are some verticals that have more problems than others. We’re going vertical by vertical.