James Bowler, Numarqe Ltd. Founder and CEO: “Our key differentiator is providing credit at the point of purchase, coupled with unparalleled visibility into financial operations. This allows companies to optimise their working capital in real time.”

Numarqe Ltd., founded by James Bowler, is reshaping the landscape of corporate credit and financial management. With over a decade of experience as a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in trading businesses, Bowler witnessed firsthand the challenges faced by profitable enterprises in securing flexible credit facilities from traditional banks. Stricter regulatory capital and liquidity requirements post-credit crunch forced banks to retreat from unsecured financing, creating a critical gap in the market.

Recognising this need, Numarqe was born to provide innovative solutions for large and mid-market corporations. At its core is an AI-driven embedded credit and financial management platform that offers collateral-free, multi-currency credit lines for seamless invoice payments. The platform integrates advanced real-time risk management—adapted from trading floor practices—into corporate credit risk analysis, delivering real-time insights into customer performance and default probabilities. Numarqe’s unified system simplifies payment processes across global payment networks, including SWIFT, SEPA, FedWire, and MasterCard, with real-time approvals, spending controls, and insightful analytics. This empowers businesses to optimise cash flow, strengthen supplier relationships, and maintain budget discipline.

Guided by founders with over 50 years of combined experience in global finance, trading, and hedge funds, Numarqe embodies a culture of scalability, precision, and efficiency. By bridging the gap left by traditional financial institutions, Numarqe is empowering corporations to thrive with unmatched financial flexibility and innovative credit solutions.

In conversation with James Bowler, Founder and CEO of Numarqe Ltd.

Q. Your platform offers features like supplier financing, virtual cards, and AI-driven credit adjustments. Can you walk us through how these features work together to enhance working capital management for your clients?

At Numarqe, we've developed a comprehensive suite of tools that work in concert to provide a holistic approach to financial management. Our supplier financing feature, for instance, allows companies to extend payment terms with their suppliers without straining those relationships. Now, let's consider how this interacts with our virtual card offering. These cards can be spun up and used to make immediate payments to suppliers, leveraging the credit line we've extended. This means that while a company might typically have 30-day payment terms with a supplier, they could potentially extend this to 60 or 90 days by using our credit facility, all without negatively impacting the supplier who receives prompt payment.

The AI-driven credit adjustments come into play here as well. Our system continuously analyses a company's financial health and spending patterns, adjusting credit limits in real time. This ensures that as a company's needs grow or change, their available credit adapts accordingly, providing the flexibility needed to optimise working capital. In fact, by utilising our AI-driven credit decisioning system, we can offer credit lines up to ten times higher than traditional lenders.

Furthermore, all of these transactions are captured in our platform, providing real-time visibility into spending across multiple entities and currencies. This data feeds into our AI-powered analytics, offering insights into spending trends and identifying cost-saving opportunities. The end result is a significant enhancement in working capital management. Companies have greater flexibility in managing payments to preserve cash and gain deeper insights into their financial operations.

Q. Numarqe offers integration with popular accounting software like Xero, Netsuite, and Sage. How does this integration enhance financial operations, and what feedback have you received from users?

We offer bidirectional sync with customers' ERPs. Essentially, there's no more manual work to reconcile payments, as our transactions, with all their underlying data, are automatically fed into the customer's accounting system. This can be either as a journal posting or, in its simplest form, a bank feed. We can also pull data from the ERP’s AP ledger into Numarqe for automated invoice uploads or assigning charts of accounts and tax categories. This saves the customer's AP team a lot of time making and reconciling payments and standardizes the ledger mapping process for expense categorization. Feedback has been very positive - not only do customers tell us this hugely streamlines their financial operations, but it has also helped elevate the role of their finance teams from mere record-keepers to strategic partners in their organization’s growth and success.

Q. In a world of increasingly complex cross-border transactions, how does Numarqe’s multi-currency functionality help companies operate seamlessly in global markets?

Numarqe's multi-currency functionality plays a pivotal role in helping companies navigate the complexities of cross-border transactions. Our platform has been specifically designed to address the challenges that arise when operating in multiple markets with different currencies.

First and foremost, Numarqe offers support for transactions in up to 36 different currencies while allowing companies to settle in British Pounds, US Dollars, or Euros. This capability effectively eliminates the need for businesses to maintain multiple foreign currency accounts, which can be both costly and administratively burdensome. Moreover, our platform provides real-time visibility into a company's financial position across various currencies and entities. And by leveraging Numarqe's competitive exchange rates, companies can save substantially on currency conversion fees for their international transactions.

Furthermore, our system simplifies the often complex process of foreign exchange management. Instead of maintaining hedging positions for future payments in different currencies, companies pay their suppliers in the required currency as needed, and repay Numarqe in the currency of their choice. This approach significantly reduces the complexity and cost associated with traditional foreign exchange management strategies.

Q. Given the competitive fintech landscape, what are the key factors that make Numarqe a preferred choice for mid-market corporates and enterprises over legacy solutions?

What truly sets Numarqe apart is our comprehensive approach to financial management. We offer a single, unified platform for global spend that seamlessly integrates into existing systems by simply dropping in. Unlike legacy credit solutions that often focus on cash advances or outdated supply chain programmes, Numarqe provides a modern, flexible credit solution that automates the entire payment process.

Our key differentiator is providing credit at the point of purchase, coupled with unparalleled visibility into financial operations. This allows companies to optimise their working capital in real time. Furthermore, our commitment to customer service ensures that clients receive personalised support throughout their journey with us.

In essence, Numarqe combines the agility of a fintech startup with the robustness required by large and mid-market corporates. We're not just offering a product but a transformative financial management experience that evolves with our clients' needs.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

There are plenty of exciting things to come - we have only just got started! We have some large strategic partnerships on the way and we’ve big plans to scale the company into new jurisdictions and add product enhancements to tackle more of the inefficiencies within the supply chain and payables process. We are gearing up to offer more payment options and currency choices for customers, and we’re exploring enhanced risk management capabilities such as large language models for faster assimilation of standardised customer financial data.

“Numarqe's multi-currency functionality plays a pivotal role in helping companies navigate the complexities of cross-border transactions. Our platform has been specifically designed to address the challenges that arise when operating in multiple markets with different currencies.”