As large banks retrench from trade finance and with The World Bank now predicting a global recession, new data from online invoice auction platform MarketInvoice has revealed that British exporters and international companies are now turning to invoice auctioning to solve their short term funding problems.

MarketInvoice has now moved into international invoice auctions and trade finance and is opening a liaison office in Hong Kong. MarketInvoice HK Limited will now help foreign SMEs solve their short term finance problems, as international credit conditions for SMEs tighten.

Data from the site has revealed that SMEs that deal in exporting goods and services to the likes of Europe, America, the Middle East and Japan have turned to invoice auctioning, with the site now attracting global buyers from afar afield as Russia, Singapore and Switzerland.

In 2011 several Hong Kong companies approached MarketInvoice to use its service as they export into large UK supermarkets and retailers such as Morrisons, Arcadia, Amazon and Homebase.  One Hong Kong company has now auctioned over £800,000 in invoices to date and is forecast to auction between $4 – $5 million of invoices via MarketInvoice this year alone as UK retailers’ take up to 45 – 90 days to settle payments. Companies in Hong Kong have also found it difficult to obtain bank loans without pledging large collateral and personal guarantees. It was against this backdrop that MarketInvoice saw an opportunity to expand and help SMEs abroad with the working capital needs for their trade links into large UK corporates.

Anil Stocker, co-founder and director of MarketInvoice said: “Our core offering  is still very much for UK SMEs with UK customers, and with the latest official figures indicating we are now entering a new recession, we anticipate that UK SMEs will rely more heavily on invoice auctioning as banks tighten their lending criteria.

“However, we simply couldn’t ignore what our data was telling us. We regularly run auctions in pounds, euros and dollars but we were finding increasingly that foreign companies, particularly several in Hong Kong who export in to large UK retailers were turning to us for help. This shows that the problems that UK SMEs are currently facing are also being faced globally. Our customers are telling us that banks in Hong Kong in particular are asking for huge guarantees to secure loans, which a lot of SMEs just can’t give. It was for these reasons that we saw an opportunity to expand our offering and set up a Hong Kong office. With a very real fear of a global recession we know that international SMEs will have as much a tough year as UK SMEs.”

Barclaycard is planning to launch Barclaycard SmartPay, a new payment processing system to help Barclaycard’s e-commerce customers manage their cross-border payments.

SmartPay, which has been piloted during 2010,will work by giving organisations access to one single payment processing system to use across markets that can be tailored to provide a range of language and currency settings dependent on where the customer is paying from.

Commenting on the upcoming launch, Paul Cook, managing director of global payment acceptance at Barclaycard said “Barclaycard SmartPay will make it easy for businesses which operate across the EU to accept all types of payments online.”

When it launches, Barclaycard SmartPay will protect customers with a wide range of built-in fraud and risk tools, be PCI DSS compliant, and will appeal to merchants in key online sectors such as gaming, retail and travel.

Barclaycard SmartPay is planned to launch in Summer 2010.