Smart Cash Flow – Getting back on track

Project Information

SCF

Grant agreement ID: 877802

DOI

10.3030/877802

Project closed

EC signature date 11 September 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 29 February 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

ASTERIA AB
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SCF (Smart Cash Flow – Getting back on track)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2020-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Each year, thousands of small businesses (SME’s) across Europe go bankrupt or suffer substantial cash flow problems due to delayed settlement of invoices, lack of cash flow planning and poor cash management. Jobs are lost and entrepreneurship is stifled. Late payment culture in Europe and elsewhere cause administrative and financial burden, which is particularly acute when businesses and customers are in different EU countries or across continents. This harms SME competitiveness and profitability. Slow-moving growth for small businesses in recent years is one of the reasons why the EU’s economies remain stagnant. With the outbreak of the latest pandemic, helping SME’s manage cash flow is crucial to the wellbeing of the EU.

In response Asteria AB offers SME’s a simple and affordable means of understanding, analyzing and forecasting their cash flow. It helps small companies to be proactive about their finances. Asteria’s Smart Cash Flow software (SCF) is the optimal pathway to link accounting software with bank accounts operational data to deliver real knowledge about the financial status of a company, anticipate cash flow problems, and offer measures to alleviate or avoid encountering these issues going forward. SCF effectively represents an important step in the democratization of access to AI and big data in fintech catering to small- and medium-sized businesses.

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

The concluded SME Instrument Phase I Project highlighted the strong commercial and technical viability of Asteria’s SCF. We have learned that our offering is attractive, and requires a lot of system upgrades and support from local partners. We have mapped technology development activities that we will pursue in the next years. Feedback and insights gathered will guide our development roadmap. The feasibility assessment helped us to further strengthen our value chain and work out a strategy on how to engage with key stakeholders to be successful, help SME’s, and grow our business.

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)

Creating an improved financing environment has become the key factor underlying most of the EU regulations and policies in the financial sector. With our innovation, we seek to contribute to the recent developments in the sphere of innovative and forward-looking solutions recognizing the strategic importance of having an advanced fintech industry supporting European SMEs. With SCF, European SMEs will have at their disposal an instrument that identifies payment patterns of potential clients, prompting the users (businesses) to get funding advice and support from their banking institutions. Taken together this will make the cash flow process understandable and natural, increasing SME’s competitiveness and profitability.

Asteria Smart Cash Flow logotype