Nook, Yapily Create First Trade Collaboration Platform For SMBs

U.K. trade collaboration platform Nook is working with open banking FinTech Yapily to launch a trade collaboration platform the companies say will eliminate invoice fraud and offer secure bulk payments for small-to-medium enterprises/businesses (SMEs).

“Many accountants and SMEs still rely on poorly integrated tools to manage their accounts payable process, resulting in inefficiencies and exposure to fraud,” the companies said in a Wednesday (July 7) news release emailed to PYMNTS. “As a consequence, UK businesses spend up to £50 processing each invoice and are losing at least £784 million in invoice fraud annually.”

Nook says it remedies this problem by integrating invoice processing, approvals, secure payments and account reconciliation, and adds the platform created with Yapily — the first of its kind — will enhance its payments and anti-fraud features.

“Harnessing Yapily’s infrastructure, Nook’s fraud protection feature integrates Know Your Business (KYB) checks into the payables process to protect SMEs and accountants against invoice fraud,” the release says. “Leveraging Open Banking in this way, Nook customers can request verification from their suppliers by authenticating their bank account.”

The companies say this gives business owners the peace of mind that they are paying a genuine invoice to a verified supplier. In addition, Nook uses Yapily’s bulk payment tool to let customers make single and bulk payments, which creates a single invoice-to-payment workflow and saves administrative hours.

Earlier this year, Yapily became the first open banking infrastructure provider to integrate with seven U.K. financial institution’s bulk payment APIs.

“Initially, people were thinking about open banking with a focus on benefits for retail only,” Yapily CEO Stefano Vaccino said in an interview with PYMNTS in April 2020. Discussing the promise of open banking and the possible innovations around it, he said, “People were not believing in open banking so much as a big evolution. When they started thinking about the small business and corporate space, I think they saw much bigger opportunities.”