Untied and Fractal SMART banking and tax software service moves to beta

Untied, the UK’s personal tax app, and Fractal Labs predict that the incorporation of untied’s tax capability with Fractal’s invoicing and management software will decrease average outstanding debt to SMEs by 29% by 2025, saving the UK economy £1bn annually.

The partners have revealed that their SMART* initiative has just moved into beta integration. The initiative received £2.5m of backing from the Banking Competitions Remedies Capability and Innovation Fund**, which has an express purpose to support the development of new services for SMEs.

Together the partners are building an integrated solution that combines collecting revenue, controlling costs and managing cash.  Tax forms a key part of this. SMART makes use of untied’s tax APIs that allow third parties to embed robust and secure personal tax capability into their own apps and services.  It will also incorporate Making Tax Digital.

During the closed beta trial, emphasis will be placed on the user journey and extend the partners’ existing capability – including Fractal’s tomato pay service and untied’s personal tax app.

untied’s CEO, Kevin Sefton commented: “Tax is often overlooked by services offered to SMEs or is otherwise incomplete. The SMART initiative is the first fully integrated and personal tax compliant end to end service for SMEs. We’re excited about deploying it with Fractal.”

According to the FSB Time to Act report, small businesses are owed on average £6,142, and as a consequence of not being paid on time, 37% experience cash flow difficulties and 30% have been forced to use an overdraft.  Retail payments authority Pay.UK shows that the balance of outstanding late payments almost doubled to £23.4bn in 2019 and the average wait time for unpaid invoices grew by 11 days to 23 days.

The findings follow previous research from Pay.UK and FSB that shows the UK late payment crisis could lead to the closure of 50,000 small businesses a year at a cost of £2.5bn to the economy.