Incomlend turns the invoice into working capital.

Financing the trade that banks walked away from

Somewhere a container leaves a port in Vietnam bound for a buyer in Germany. The goods are on the water. The invoice is signed. And the small manufacturer that made them will not see a cent for 60 days. That waiting period - dull, invisible, and lethal to cash-strapped exporters - is the exact problem Incomlend was built to solve. The Singapore company runs an invoice-financing marketplace: businesses upload their trade invoices, and institutional investors fund them, often within 48 hours, for up to 90% of face value. No new debt on the balance sheet, no property pledged as collateral. Just an invoice, converted into cash while the ship is still at sea.

Founded in 2016 by Morgan Terigi and Dimitri Kouchnirenko, Incomlend sits in a corner of finance that most people never think about and most banks would rather avoid. Trade finance for small and mid-sized firms is expensive to underwrite and hard to scale - the paperwork on a $50,000 invoice looks a lot like the paperwork on a $50 million loan. That mismatch left a gap the Asian Development Bank and others have pegged in the trillions. Incomlend's answer was to treat each invoice as a discrete, fundable unit and let technology carry the cost of underwriting it.

A ledger, not a headline

Those figures are the company's own, and the platform reports processing more than $2 billion in invoices to date. What they describe is less a moonshot than an accumulation - one settled invoice at a time, across more than 20 industries from electronics and chemicals to textiles, metals and agriculture.

Why liquidity, not profit, kills SMEs

The word that explains the whole model: cherry-picking

Most trade-finance funds ask investors to buy into a blind pool - money in, exposure spread across receivables you never see. Incomlend inverts that. Its marketplace lets investors examine and choose individual invoices, deciding deal by deal which exporter, buyer and shipment they want to back. That optionality is unusual in this asset class, and it is a large part of why institutional money showed up.

The other differentiator is regulatory. Incomlend Capital secured a Capital Markets Services licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, letting it run fund-management activity under supervision. In a sector littered with lightly-regulated lenders, that licence is a moat as much as a formality.

A two-sided marketplace, drawn simply

Incomlend earns fees for originating and underwriting invoices and matching them with capital. Businesses on one side need working capital; investors on the other want short-duration, credit-insured yield. Incomlend Capital adds a fund-management layer on top.

The elegance is in the middle box. Incomlend does the credit assessment, the compliance checks and - where applicable - arranges credit insurance, so neither side has to trust the other directly. They trust the platform.

Where Incomlend operates

Two friends, one dull-but-global idea

Four ways to move cash

From factory floors to family offices

On the borrowing side, Incomlend's customers are SME exporters and importers in global trade - 850+ companies spanning manufacturing, electronics, chemicals, textiles, metals, FMCG and agriculture, with strength across Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong and Europe. A concrete example: in 2023 the company launched a multi-million financing programme for SafeFlex International, an India-based maker of flexible bulk containers, letting it cash invoices as early as three days after shipment.

On the funding side sit institutional and accredited investors, funds and family offices looking for short-duration, credit-insured yield uncorrelated with public markets. One of them - shipping giant CMA CGM - is also an investor in the company, meaning the money and the cargo sometimes travel the same network.

Ten years, one ledger

A niche with trillion-dollar edges

Incomlend competes with a growing field of trade-finance and receivables platforms - names like Stenn, Modifi, Drip Capital, Demica and LiquidX - as well as the factoring and supply-chain-finance desks of traditional banks. Its position is defined by three choices: cross-border first, invoice-level transparency for investors, and a regulated fund-management wrapper. Singapore helps too. The city sits on the world's shipping lanes, has a respected regulator and deep pools of institutional capital - geography as strategy.

The things people ask