An invoice is a peculiar souvenir of a successful sale. It records the work, names the customer and promises money. Then it sits there. For the supplier, the interval between delivery and payment can become a business problem all of its own. Morgan Terigi built his second act around that interval, after spending years in a trade where orders eventually have to become actual clothes.
Today he leads Incomlend, the Singapore-based invoice financing marketplace he co-founded in 2016. Its business concerns the money owed after goods and services have been supplied. There is something pleasingly unromantic about that starting point. An entrepreneur can dream of changing commerce; a supplier would quite like to pay for the next order.
The garment trader’s education
Terigi’s preparation combined mechanical engineering with an MBA from HEC Paris, completed in 1999. His subsequent career took him into Asian garment businesses. He served as a director of PMC International from 2005 to 2015 and held leadership roles at BMT International and PMC Fashion before starting Incomlend.
Those details put an operating business before the financial platform. He arrived with experience of being a company owner and a user of trade finance. When a former business partner mentioned receivables-financing platforms in China and Singapore, the possibility connected with something he already understood.
The leap was therefore quite specific: apply online tools to a financing activity with an established commercial purpose. A familiar service could be organised differently. The trader’s paperwork supplied the subject; software offered another way to handle it.
An invoice learns to travel
Incomlend’s early partnership story brought together two different kinds of experience. Terigi knew international trading and manufacturing. Dmitri Kouchnirenko brought a banking background. They had known each other since their student days. Their platform sought to connect businesses needing working capital with funders looking for somewhere to put money.
It is an arrangement with two customers and two clocks. A supplier wants payment sooner. A funder can wait, provided the transaction meets its requirements. Selling a receivable at a discount gives that waiting period a price. The invoice becomes something that can connect those preferences.
By July 2017, the platform had been live since the previous September. Terigi was discussing a route to growth through large corporate buyers and their supplier networks. The buyer’s credit quality could help support financing for smaller companies supplying it. One relationship might introduce the platform to many suppliers, although each still had to agree to participate and complete checks.
Persuading the large company required work of its own. The immediate cash went to the suppliers, so the case had to extend beyond the buyer’s own financing needs. A purchasing department’s payment terms can have consequences far down its supply chain. Terigi’s pitch asked the buyer to consider those consequences.
“We’re enabling money to circulate faster, legally.”
Morgan Terigi, 2017
The shipping connection
In August 2020, Incomlend announced a $20 million Series A led by Sequoia India, with shipping and logistics group CMA CGM participating. The planned uses included expansion in Europe and Asia and further development of digital underwriting and invoice processing. A financier and a shipping company had reasons to take an interest in the same piece of paper.
The business had already facilitated more than 2,000 transactions worth over $330 million across 50 countries by the time of that announcement. Those were company figures reported in 2020. They describe a platform handling an existing flow of commerce, rather than an idea waiting for its first shipment.
For Terigi, the shipping connection also concerned evidence. Work with CMA CGM included digitising bills of lading, documents central to shipping transactions. Knowing what had moved mattered to knowing what could be financed. A polished application screen would be of limited comfort if the trade underneath it were imaginary.
He discussed that risk plainly: documents might be inauthentic, or a transaction might never have happened. Commercial disputes presented a separate difficulty because credit insurance did not cover every kind of disagreement. These distinctions help explain his work more precisely than a broad promise of faster finance. Speed requires confidence in what is being accelerated.
His interest in verification extends beyond individual shipping documents. In a 2021 RegTalks conversation, Terigi argued for greater information exchange between financiers. He described a system in which banks could communicate discreetly without breaching confidentiality or privacy obligations, helping them prevent problems. The proposal adds another dimension to his view of technology. A marketplace needs information about its participants, and separate institutions may each hold only part of the picture. His emphasis was on making that picture more useful while respecting the limits on disclosure. The ambition was practical cooperation between financiers, with the rules around information treated as part of the design.
When the paperwork turned inward
Incomlend’s own founding arrangements also became contentious. A dispute involving Terigi, Kouchnirenko and technology founder Laurence Hook reached Singapore’s Appellate Division. Hook had continued working at HSBC rather than entering full-time employment with Incomlend. His shares were transferred to Terigi and Kouchnirenko in 2018, and litigation followed.
The January 2023 appeal produced a divided result. The court found that Hook had breached employment-related provisions of the first shareholders’ deed and was not entitled to retain his shares. His counterclaim for their loss therefore failed. But the court declined to declare that Terigi and Kouchnirenko had been entitled to transfer those shares solely to themselves: the applicable mechanism also included the original investors.
It was a partial success for the appellants, with an unresolved distinction about where the shares should go. The episode belongs in the company’s history alongside the funding rounds. Building a marketplace depends on agreements with outsiders; building the company also depends on agreements among the people at its beginning.
The cost of keeping a spare
Terigi’s public writing returns to the decisions an operating business has to make. In a June 2022 article, he examined the trade-offs involved in rebuilding supply chains. Keeping extra inventory can protect against shortages, but it also ties up capital and creates the possibility of stock becoming obsolete. Spare capacity has a bill attached.
He argued for examining supplier networks, finding vulnerable points and diversifying. Yet recognising a sensible change does not supply the money required to make it. A smaller business may understand precisely what would make it more resilient while struggling to finance the transition.
That tension connects his trading background to his later work. Finance enters the story through a practical decision about inventory, suppliers or the next production run. The money has a job to do before anyone gives it an asset-class label.
His approach to running his own business contains a related caution. “I tend to follow Murphy’s Law.” In Terigi’s account, a good period is an opportunity to reinforce the business and prepare for difficulties. Prosperity is apparently no excuse to put one’s feet up. The furniture of entrepreneurship rarely includes a comfortable footstool.
New vocabulary, familiar arithmetic
By March 2025, Terigi was describing two directions for Incomlend: building its presence in India and working more deeply with real-world assets, blockchain and smart contracts. The stated ambition was to improve financing economics for businesses and investors. Those were plans he articulated, with outcomes still requiring their own evidence.
The geographic move followed the company’s cross-border character. India offered another substantial trading market to serve, and he spoke of establishing a team there. His description of the technology work was equally connected to distribution: bring assets and funding together through different digital arrangements.
His April 2025 appearance on Beyond Beta with Kaia placed trade finance in a wider private-credit conversation. The subject had moved beyond the early marketplace pitch into the relationship between business receivables, alternative capital and digital assets. A different audience could approach the same unpaid invoice from the investment side.
September’s GTR conference programmes continued that direction. In Singapore, Terigi was listed in conversation with journalist Mariko Oi about connecting traditional and decentralised finance. In Geneva, the programme described tokenised solutions for commodity businesses and work by Incomlend’s DeFi subsidiary, Nexade. These appearances mark the development of his public agenda; they do not establish that every proposed saving has been achieved.
Five languages, one persistent question
There are details beyond the balance sheet. Terigi’s public professional profile lists English, French and Chinese at native or bilingual proficiency, with Japanese and Spanish at professional working proficiency. It also records a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt certification issued in December 2018. Neither detail needs a motivational slogan stapled to it. Both add texture to a career spent across borders.
His involvement extends to LC Lite, whose management page identifies him as a co-founder. The continuing connection between trading experience and financial technology is visible there too. He has remained interested in the point where a claim on future payment becomes something an investor can hold.
Incomlend now reports more than $2 billion in financed trades across 50 countries. That cumulative company figure measures transactions, rather than Terigi’s personal wealth or the platform’s revenue. The distinction matters in a business where large sums pass through on their way to somebody else.
The invoice remains the useful object to keep in view. It carries a record of work already done and a date when payment should arrive. Terigi’s career has come to revolve around what a business can do between those two facts. The clothes were an earlier chapter. The waiting became the business.