“With Denario, businesses can pay multiple invoices at once and will only pay when they have to. This prevents cash constrained businesses from paying too early, or too late and thereby optimises working capital without the need to check each invoice individually.” says Pohlmann, Co-founder and CEO of Denario.

The Slack of business payment
Slack was designed as a messaging platform and was specifically developed for the workplace to allow for a unique experience when communicating with colleagues. “The same way that Slack is the new way to communicate in the workplace, Denario will become the new way to pay your business partners directly without any intermediary.'' says Pohlmann.

According to the company, the creation of a new business payment network would especially benefit small businesses with less automated processes and significant administrative overhead. “Our vision is to enable a seamless flow of money in a secure network that helps small businesses to gain actionable insight into their cash position while also removing costly intermediaries and manual payment processes”, says Pohlmann.

Payment superpowers for any bank account
The aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 triggered many traditional financial institutions to “unbundle” their services such as SME lending or trade finance lending. The new fragmented structure of banking services led to a wave of financial innovation in the following years. After realizing the potential in the individual services, the major players strove to “rebundle” them in their offerings again, becoming more innovative themselves. When it comes to business payments, we have seen limited unbundling, which is why innovation in this area has largely been absent.

“Payments can be seen as the bloodstream of our economy and therefore have become a commodity in both traditional and modern business banking. Therefore, there has been less innovation and improvement in payment processing for SMEs than in many other areas.” says Pohlmann.

Denario aims to bring innovation to business payments without replacing existing banking infrastructure. Any bank account can be linked to the Denario system to create a new payment experience from receiving, to scheduling and processing, to payment reconciliation.