Barclays punts $200m on Australia with TP24 debt deal
Swiss invoice finance provider TP24 has secured a new $200 million warehouse finance facility from British investment bank Barclays to deploy in Australia, in what TP24’s chief executive says should be a “wake-up call” for the big four.
Tradeplus24’s local head Adam Lane.
The Australian segment represents the biggest piece of a facility worth $585 million overall, with the remainder to be split across other markets like the UK and the Netherlands where the Zurich-based TP24 is active. Invoice financing is where businesses borrow against the money owed by their customers to improve cash flow.
Although it has been around for decades in various forms, it made headlines with the collapse of Greensill.
Local managing director Adam Lane said Australia represented between 30 and 40 per cent of the global business after launching here in 2019, but said the big domestic banks had “self-selected out” of the industry.
“They priced where they thought the market was,” Mr Lane said. “And then we went to Europe and realised that there was a material difference between the cost of doing business down here versus a more global player.”
It is one of the first big global warehouse funding deals in Australia since 2021, when Goldman Sachs provided a $270 million facility to similar invoice financing play Timelio. Timelio was recapitalised last year and its two founders, Andrew and Charlotte Petris, left the company.
These deals effectively give the global banks an avenue to compete via the back door for small business customers with Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and National Australia Bank.
Mr Lane hoped this would spark a new wave of warehouse debt deals, even as wholesale funding costs rise with interest rates, and TP24 global CEO Ben
Read more on afr.com
