Intelligent cashflow management and forecasting platform providing insights for financial decision making of SMEs

Project Information

Fluidly

Grant agreement ID: 877353

DOI

10.3030/877353

Project closed

EC signature date 15 July 2019

Start date 1 August 2019

End date 30 November 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

FLUIDLY LIMITED
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Fluidly (Intelligent cashflow management and forecasting platform providing insights for financial decision making of SMEs)

Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2019-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

European SMEs play a vital role by contributing 56% to the European region economy. Despite their importance, SMEs are facing a huge challenge of dealing with their highly complex finances, the need to ensure appropriate and timely funding and managing cashflow and working capital. These are acting as major operating constraints for SMEs. Cashflow is the lifeblood of any business and the forecasting is critical to avoid shortfalls in cash balances, ensuring that payments can be made and ultimately avoid insolvency. Whilst there is an increased focus towards improving the financial situation, the inability to manage SMEs finances effectively is still a significant cause of small business failure (50% of SMEs fail in the first 5-years with 82% of failures due to cashflow issues). Currently, the management of SME’s finances are delivered either by a remote book-keeper or an expensive in-house accountant, yet providing a poor quality of financial services and delays. Existing big data implementation in accounting industry is at a very early stage, and the emergence of big data analytics and artificial intelligence creates an opportunity for SMEs to exploit the data for intelligent financial and business decisions.

Fluidly is an augmented intelligent fintech solution for SMEs to extract valuable financial insights to perform cashflow management, intuitive forecasting and future investments. It is a software platform which uses advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms to leverage information from business accounting and raw financial data. It provides business owners with real-time insights about cash flow, its projection, AI-driven insights and actionable financial recommendations. Fluidly also provides lending insights to procure beneficial and better financing as well as business deals.

The overall objectives of the project include, defining a minimum viable product, establish a feasible product development plan and industrialisation strategy, plan demonstration and validation trials and analyse risks and opportunities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Fludly undertook a full analysis of both the technical and business potential of the Fludly platform concluding that it would be highly valuable for the fin-tech industry specifically for SMEs and accountancy firms. Fluidly reviewed the development of fluidly platform and analysed the user requirements and determined the necessary engineering and optimisation required. Fluidly defined the testing to be performed to ensure effective technical validation, and a commercial validation to determine the benefits for SMEs, accountancy firms, accountants and financial systems. Fluidly also utilised the feasibility study to review and establish the value chain; to analyse the target markets and define the commercialisation strategy; and to elaborate financial projections and required investments. It is concluded that in order to reach commercialisation, Fluidly should aim to optimise the cashflow management and forecasting algorithm to enhance the accuracy of its AI predictions and recommendation features, develop AI and data analytics algorithms for new features such as scenario building and financing feature, to scale-up the existing cloud infrastructure to support more than 50,000 users in an efficient and secure manner, validate the technology by pilot tests with with 2,000 SMEs, 2 accountancy firms and 25 lending service providers.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Fluidly is creating a new FinTech market segment by enabling AI-driven cashflow management, forecasting and lending/financial insights on a single platform, hence reducing the complexity for users (both SMEs and Accountancy firms simultaneously) and risks. The expected outcome of the project is to successfully upgrade the Fluidly software, advance the AI and demonstrate the technical functionality with SMEs and accountancy firms. The commercialisation of Fluidly platform equipped with advanced financial analytics and credit control features, will enable the early detection of any anamolies in the company's cash flow and debt while providing intelligent recommendations to correct them. Thus, providing a way for customers to assess the financial health of SMEs and insightful actions to remedy the financial shortfalls. This will result into of increase in cash flow of SMEs, increasing their prospect to meet their high R&D expenses which further impacts their product commercialisation. Therefore, resulting into huge impact in terms of increased revenues and steady employment within Europe and Worldwife, thus boosting the economy.

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