Spenda Ltd (ASX:SPX) has kicked off the new year with a strategic investment in blockchain data partner Fresh Supply Co (FSCO) to cornerstone its agribusiness strategy.
The transaction services business seeded A$1.025 million for a 4% stake in FSCO, meaning Spenda can appoint a director to the board.
Later this month, both parties will release an agri-specialised instance of Spenda’s Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable software.
The platform is designed to facilitate faster payments to primary producers and uses agricultural operational data to de-risk Spenda’s lending opportunity to the agriculture market.
Spenda will also work with other FSCO investors to open up further agricultural business opportunities.
Big-picture, the investment further aligns the two businesses and exposes Spenda to FSCO’s extensive agribusiness networks, bringing it one step closer to delivering liquidity to every layer of the agriculture value chain.
Forging secure partnerships
Spenda managing director Adrian Floate said: “As an agnostic supply chain solution, Spenda takes the friction out of business transactions, blurring the lines between the trading cycle, trade credit and structured debt.
“As part of our growth strategy, we need to forge secure partnerships with industry-specific champions so that we can add industry specialisation to our software to meet the needs of different vertical markets.
“Combining the innovation in Fresh Supply Co’s technology and the visibility they have in the data cycle with Spenda’s Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable technology stack provides a unique solution that offers irrefutable value to the agricultural sector.”
Building new financial infrastructure
Fresh Supply Co co-founder and CEO David Inderias said Spenda and FSCO’s shared vision had grown since the companies worked together with joint partner Mastercard.
“That vision is the consolidation of data, payments and lending technology. These are being applied to the agrifood and commodity supply chain sector, which is particularly exciting given the importance of food security and supply chains,” he explained.
“We are seeing a push in the permanent recording of assets and financial flows in offline industries like agriculture and food production, otherwise known as tokenisation — centred around distributed ledgers/blockchain.
“This concept extends to payment triggers, deposits and credit/debt, where new financial infrastructure for the next 10+ years is being built now.
“When coupled with Spenda Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable … we will get real capabilities in working beyond the constraints of typical banking institutions — powered by data.
“We look forward to sharing the collaborative hard work that has been going on behind the scenes — watch this space.”