TEG‘s SmartPay platform has surpassed £478 million in total payments to UK road haulage businesses since launch, with £418 million of that figure processed in the 12 months to October 2026. The milestone underlines a sharp acceleration in adoption among a sector historically locked out of mainstream invoice finance.

SmartPay was designed to address a structural cash-flow problem in UK road freight, a market estimated at £39.3 billion annually. Standard payment terms in the sector run from 30 to 90 days, while average profitability margins for hauliers sit at around 2%. For the SMEs and sole traders that make up the bulk of the carrier base, that gap between delivery and payment is not merely an inconvenience: it determines whether they can fund fuel, pay drivers, or accept the next load.

How the product works

Rather than routing carriers through a conventional credit application, SmartPay finances against the completed booking. Once an invoice is approved, funds clear in under four minutes on average, with remittance and reconciliation handled automatically. Carriers request early payment from the same dashboard they use to accept loads, so onboarding, identity verification and payment form a single workflow rather than separate processes.

TEG’s chief revenue officer Sam Wilkinson noted that speed alone is not the constraint: “You cannot safely pay a carrier faster unless you know who they are. The pain point is usually the admin around it, from onboarding a new carrier to verifying who they are and checking their bank details. Every SmartPay transaction runs through verification with TEG’s partner Trustd, so onboarding, verification and payment are part of the same workflow, and speed never comes at the expense of assurance.”

Payments are made on a non-recourse basis, meaning carriers are protected against late or unpaid invoices provided they complete the load and supply proof of delivery. The platform also carries proactive credit control that flags late payments within days rather than waiting on member reports.

TEG founder and chief executive Lyall Cresswell framed the cumulative volume as a shift in the sector’s underlying infrastructure: “What began as a faster way to get paid is becoming the financial infrastructure this industry has never had.”

SmartPay won the Best Initiative in Embedded Finance category at the PAY360 Awards 2026, judged by more than 70 industry professionals drawn from organisations including Mastercard, Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest.

Market context and regulatory backdrop

The low penetration of invoice finance across UK SMEs is a longstanding structural issue. UK Finance data indicates that around 40,000 businesses use invoice finance or asset-based lending, representing fewer than 1% of the 5.6 million businesses registered in the UK. Traditional facilities carry minimum thresholds that systematically exclude micro-operators and sole traders, the very businesses that dominate the carrier end of road freight.

The embedded-finance model that SmartPay represents sits at the intersection of several active policy conversations. The FCA‘s ongoing review of non-bank lending and its work on the SME finance market is relevant here, as is the broader push under the UK’s payment strategy for account-to-account settlement to replace slower batch processes. Where SmartPay embeds payments inside a logistics workflow rather than offering them as a standalone credit product, it sidesteps some of the regulatory friction that affects conventional invoice discounters, though the non-recourse structure and the credit-control function will attract scrutiny if volumes continue to scale.

The competitive landscape for embedded freight payments is still forming. Several logistics-adjacent fintech platforms and larger supply-chain finance providers have moved in a similar direction, but few have achieved comparable penetration within a single vertical. TEG’s position, combining carrier sourcing, compliance and payment in one platform, gives it a distribution advantage that a standalone payments product would find difficult to replicate organically.

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