TEG‘s SensiblePay platform has surpassed £478 million in whole funds to UK street haulage companies since launch, with £418 million of that determine processed within the 12 months to October 2026. The milestone underlines a pointy acceleration in adoption amongst a sector traditionally locked out of mainstream bill finance.
SensiblePay was designed to deal with a structural cash-flow downside in UK street freight, a market estimated at £39.3 billion yearly. Standard cost phrases within the sector run from 30 to 90 days, whereas common profitability margins for hauliers sit at round 2%. For the SMEs and sole merchants that make up the majority of the service base, that hole between supply and cost isn’t merely an inconvenience: it determines whether or not they can fund gas, pay drivers, or settle for the subsequent load.
How the product works
Rather than routing carriers by means of a traditional credit score software, SensiblePay funds towards the finished reserving. Once an bill is permitted, funds clear in beneath 4 minutes on common, with remittance and reconciliation dealt with robotically. Carriers request early cost from the identical dashboard they use to simply accept hundreds, so onboarding, id verification and cost type a single workflow reasonably than separate processes.
TEG’s chief income officer Sam Wilkinson famous that pace alone isn’t 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 foundation, that means carriers are protected towards late or unpaid invoices offered they full the load and provide proof of supply. The platform additionally carries proactive credit score management that flags late funds inside days reasonably than ready on member experiences.
TEG founder and chief government Lyall Cresswell framed the cumulative quantity as a shift within the sector’s underlying infrastructure: “What began as a faster way to get paid is becoming the financial infrastructure this industry has never had.”
SensiblePay gained the Best Initiative in Embedded Finance class on the PAY360 Awards 2026, judged by greater than 70 trade professionals drawn from organisations together with Mastercard, Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest.
Market context and regulatory backdrop
The low penetration of bill finance throughout UK SMEs is a longstanding structural problem. UK Finance information signifies that round 40,000 companies use bill finance or asset-based lending, representing fewer than 1% of the 5.6 million companies registered within the UK. Traditional services carry minimal thresholds that systematically exclude micro-operators and sole merchants, the very companies that dominate the service finish of street freight.
The embedded-finance mannequin that SensiblePay represents sits on the intersection of a number of lively coverage 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 cost technique for account-to-account settlement to exchange slower batch processes. Where SensiblePay embeds funds inside a logistics workflow reasonably than providing them as a standalone credit score product, it sidesteps among the regulatory friction that impacts standard bill discounters, although the non-recourse construction and the credit-control perform will entice scrutiny if volumes proceed to scale.
The aggressive panorama for embedded freight funds remains to be forming. Several logistics-adjacent fintech platforms and bigger supply-chain finance suppliers have moved in an analogous route, however few have achieved comparable penetration inside a single vertical. TEG’s place, combining service sourcing, compliance and cost in a single platform, offers it a distribution benefit {that a} standalone funds product would discover tough to copy organically.
AI stage 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, construction or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
