Hokodo’s 2023 Wrapped

Hokodo became the first payment terms provider with an EMI payments licence

Let’s start with one of Hokodo’s biggest and most pivotal news stories of the year. Back in June, we announced our acquisition of a Lithuanian payments business, making us the first and, still now, the only provider of our kind with a full European payments licence.

This acquisition is part of Hokodo’s journey to make better payment options available to B2B sellers. How? It enables us to offer our payment terms solutions across the full EU and the UK, making it easier than ever for European buyers and sellers to access the credit they deserve.

To support the acquisition and subsequent expansion, we have opened an office in Vilnius, Lithuania, and have started to build a local team, with our first hires in legal, compliance and finance. 

We helped merchants streamline their checkouts with a ‘Pay Now’ solution 

As if the ability to offer payment terms across Europe wasn’t already cool enough, the EMI has also enabled us to build a ‘Pay Now’ feature to complement our trade credit offering.

This eliminates the need for sellers to integrate with several solution providers and empowers them to compete on an even playing field with more established players. It also makes reconciliations smoother by incorporating Pay Now and Pay Later into one statement of account. Meanwhile, buyers benefit from a consistent and harmonised user experience that enables them to pay how they want to. Everybody wins!

But that isn’t the only new feature we’ve been cooking up…

In addition to ‘Pay Now’, our expert product and engineering teams have been hard at work developing a whole menu of new payment terms solutions and features that make B2B commerce faster and easier.

One of the most significant new product features empowers B2B buyers to split the payment of large purchases into monthly or biweekly payments. Meanwhile, our new and improved merchant dashboard empowers sellers to manage orders effortlessly, make informed decisions and understand the status of orders. Book a call with a payments consultant to find out more about our suite of product features.

We celebrated Hokodo’s 5th birthday!

2023 marked Hokodo’s 5th birthday – and what better way to celebrate than by bringing the team together at our offsite in March for some Hokodo branded birthday cake!?

Check out the infographic below for the highlights of Hokodo’s first five years.

Our partner network expanded

We kicked off 2023 with the announcement of our partnership with Lemonway to help drive the growth of B2B marketplaces in Europe – but there was even more to come as the year went by.

In March and April, we launched two of our highest profile partnerships to date, with Citi and BNP Paribas respectively. Both of these partnerships enable large multinational corporations to provide payment terms to their business customers.

Through the summer, we were thrilled to announce collaborations with B2B marketplace specialist Mangopay and Oro, the globally-adopted leading platform for B2B digital commerce.

And if that wasn’t enough, we had an exciting, first-of-its-kind partnership to reveal in the autumn. Back in October, we began working with Balance, a US-based B2B payments company, in order to help merchants and marketplaces in Europe and North America offer cross-border payment terms.

One thing is for certain – it’s going to be difficult to top our 2023 partnerships efforts in the new year!

Citi doubled down on their support for Hokodo

In April, we received a Series B extension from Citi, less than 10 months after our initial Series B announcement in June 2022. It was a real vote of confidence from one of our new partners, and helped us to achieve our goals for the year.

At the time, Chris Cox, Global Head of Trade and Working Capital Solutions at Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions said: “Citi is pleased to invest in Hokodo, and we look forward to deepening our relationship further. Digital marketplaces are increasingly important to our clients and their evolving business models, which require always-on and real-time digital trade and working capital solutions.”

We joined the ever growing world of podcasts

In 2023, we did what any good business does: we started a podcast! Across 8 episodes (so far) The B2B Club has taken us on a journey of exploration, covering a variety of topics designed to provide impactful and actionable insights for B2B businesses. With episodes on customer success, content marketing, fraud detection and so much more, there’s something for everyone. 

Check out the latest episode below.

The team came together in London and Vilnius

This year, Hokodo’s legendary bi-annual offsites took place in London in March and in Vilnius in October. Both events were a chance to bring together all members of our exceptional team, whether they’re based in the UK, France, Lithuania or remotely, for a few days of team building, strategic meetings and – most importantly – fun! 

Check out the video below for a sneak peek at what we got up to in London.

We did our homework

Back in February, we teamed up with Fluid Commerce for the B2B Top 50 Ecommerce Report 2023. The report reviewed and analysed 50 B2B retailers, scoring them for evidence of e-commerce best practice. The result? We learned that just 28% of B2B e-commerce sites offer a Buy Now, Pay Later option at the checkout.

Later in the year, we worked with our friends at Balance on a comprehensive report exploring cross-border payment terms. We found that:

• Just 16% of B2B sellers find it ‘very easy’ to offer global payment terms
• 79% of UK and US small businesses consider payment terms essential for growth
• 62% of B2B sellers want a payment terms solution that can be applied across multiple regions

Not to brag but, we won some awards…

Hokodo is officially an award-winning provider of digital trade credit! (Damn, we’ve always wanted to say that…)

This year, we were honoured to be named the winner of the Best Business Payments System – UK & Europe award at the PayTech Awards. But that’s not all. 

We are also incredibly proud of our VP of Engineering, Natalie Wood, who was chosen as a winner of the 'Top 1% Leaders Award' at the Top 1% Workplace Awards 2023!

The judges said: "Natalie has made significant contributions in the field of neurodiversity. She courageously embarked on a personal journey of self-discovery, realising her own autism, and is now actively working to raise awareness and create a more inclusive world."

Hokodo was highly commended for ‘The Best Emerging FinTech Workplace Award’ and shortlisted for ‘The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award’ at the same awards. That’s a pretty solid performance all round, if we do say so ourselves.

Our first events were a hit

In September, we hosted our first Hoko-Meet event in London. This was part of our mission to begin building a community where Senior Executives from B2B marketplaces can come together for networking, learning opportunities, growth and social events. It was a really special evening with excellent speakers and insightful presentations, accompanied by some delicious drinks and nibbles! 

This was followed in November by an exclusive dinner and networking event in Paris, hosted by Hokodo and featuring our partners at Mangopay, plus a number of invited merchants and marketplaces.

Keep your eyes peeled for a Hokodo event near you in 2024…

B2B buyers and sellers grew faster with our safe, simple and supported payment terms

The most important thing we did all year? What we’ve always done – provided B2B buyers and sellers with accessible trade credit that helps them to accelerate their growth. 

This year, a whole host of new merchants and marketplaces in a variety of industries integrated one of our payment terms solutions into their checkout. This meant that by March we were able to help our 50,000th business to access instant, flexible credit at the checkout – here’s to many more in the new year!