Greensill Accelerates Payments To UK Pharmacies With Forecasting

Greensill is aiming to offer financial assistance to pharmacies in the United Kingdom with a payment technology it created with the NHS Business Service Authority (NHSBSA), according to an announcement.

The FinTech said it is harnessing modern technologies and information analytics to provide an outlook for the value of prescriptions a pharmacy is set to dispense, which allows for payment a month before they are filled.

Greensill Vice Chairman Bill Crothers said in the announcement, “Paying pharmacists in advance at ultra-low rates will help these vital businesses at a time when so many rely on the essential services and medication they provide. We are always delighted to be able to use our technology to remove finance costs from a supply chain but never more so than when we can support small businesses that play such a key role in supporting our nation’s health.”

Approximately 1,000 pharmacies that the FinTech works with throughout the U.K. were the recipients of the first of the payments this week. In addition, more than 10,000 pharmacies can now harness the payment option, per the announcement. As of July 2018, Greensill has worked with more than 1,000 pharmacies, making over 1.2 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) of supply chain finance payments annually.

The company said its new payment program finds patterns in the manner in which prescriptions are filled out to ascertain the value of pharmaceuticals to be dispensed in a certain timeframe. Martin Kelsall, director of Primary Care Services at NHSBSA, said in the release that the service lets British pharmacies “be paid in advance for the prescriptions they dispense to provide vital frontline community healthcare.”

In June, Greensill had purchased Omni, a lender to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) based in South America. The deal was to bring Greensill closer to its worldwide growth targets by growing B2B functions to the Latin American area. Latin American finances account for approximately $750 billion of the expansive $56.3 trillion worldwide market for working capital finance.