TEG SmartPay Processes £418m for UK Hauliers in 12 Months

TEG’s SmartPay has processed £418 million in payments to UK road haulage businesses in the 12 months to October 2026, taking its total since launch above £478 million. The recent volume suggests that payment tools tied to freight operations are finding a practical use in a sector where long invoice terms can put pressure on small carriers’ cash flow. The total shows activity, though it doesn’t by itself reveal how many carriers use the service, how often they use it or how much of the wider market it reaches.

Payment speed meets a thin-margin business

UK road freight is estimated to be a £39.3 billion annual market, but hauliers often wait 30 to 90 days for payment. With average profit margins around 2%, that delay can shape whether a small operator or sole trader can cover fuel, pay drivers or take on another load. A completed job may therefore leave a carrier with money owed but little room to absorb routine costs while waiting for settlement.

Those businesses make up much of the carrier base, yet conventional invoice finance has often been out of reach. A financing product can be of limited help if its application process, eligibility rules or minimum facility size don’t fit a small operator’s needs. For a business working on narrow margins, the value of earlier payment depends not only on the money arriving sooner, but also on whether the service is accessible and predictable.

Payment built into the booking workflow

SmartPay advances funds against completed bookings rather than sending carriers through a conventional credit application. After an invoice is approved, payment clears in an average of less than four minutes. That figure describes the payment stage after approval; it doesn’t establish how long the full process takes from completing a load to receiving funds.

Remittance and reconciliation are automated, and carriers can request early payment through the dashboard they already use to accept loads. TEG presents onboarding, identity checks and payment as one connected process. This integration may reduce the administrative steps involved in asking for payment, a useful feature for operators who have limited back-office capacity. The speed of the transfer is only one part of the proposition.

That process matters as much as the transfer time, TEG chief revenue officer Sam Wilkinson said. “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.” Verification is central to the model TEG describes: faster payment depends on establishing who’s being paid and confirming the relevant details.

Payments are made on a non-recourse basis. Carriers are protected from late or unpaid invoices if they complete the load and provide proof of delivery. That condition matters: the protection described applies to qualifying completed work with the required documentation, rather than removing every risk attached to a transaction. SmartPay also uses proactive credit control to flag overdue payments within days, rather than relying on members to report them.

TEG founder and chief executive Lyall Cresswell described the platform’s role as expanding beyond faster settlement: “What began as a faster way to get paid is becoming the financial infrastructure this industry has never had.” That’s an ambitious description of the opportunity. Whether the platform becomes infrastructure will depend on sustained use and dependable operations, not payment volume alone.

Scale and competitive position

Invoice finance remains uncommon among UK businesses. UK Finance data cited by TEG puts the number using invoice finance or asset-based lending at about 40,000, fewer than 1% of the 5.6 million businesses registered in the country. Traditional facilities often have minimum thresholds that exclude micro-operators and sole traders, despite their importance to road freight. The comparison gives context for the access problem, though it doesn’t show how many of those businesses are hauliers or would qualify for SmartPay.

SmartPay’s distribution is tied to TEG’s broader logistics platform, which combines carrier sourcing, compliance and payment. That gives it a route into freight operations that a standalone payments service would need to build. For carriers already using the platform to accept loads, bringing payment into the same workflow may make early settlement easier to find and request. If you're working in this space, that link between the booking process and payment is the part most likely to shape adoption (and this is the part most people overlook).

Competitors in logistics fintech and supply-chain finance are also moving toward embedded payments, though few have reached comparable scale within a single sector. A specialist platform may have an advantage when it understands the work around a payment, including booking and delivery documentation. But it also has to make the process reliable across those steps. The numbers here are substantial, but they don’t settle the question of how durable that advantage is.

TEG said SmartPay won Best Initiative in Embedded Finance at the 2026 PAY360 Awards. More than 70 industry professionals judged the category, including representatives from Mastercard, Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest. The award offers industry recognition; it isn’t a substitute for evidence about repeat usage, payment performance or the experience of smaller carriers.

What the growth needs to prove

The payment total and award point to growing traction; the practical measure will be whether the service can sustain that volume while keeping verification and payment operations effective. Scale can make a service more relevant to the sector, but it also increases the importance of handling onboarding, invoice approval and exceptions consistently. A quick average payment time is meaningful only alongside clarity about the steps that come before approval.

For carriers, the immediate appeal is clear: funds can arrive sooner after approval, and the request sits within a familiar operational tool. For TEG, the broader opportunity is to make payment part of the service that connects freight work from booking through settlement. The harder test is whether that convenience holds up across different operators and transactions. Faster cash flow. The test is whether it stays dependable as use grows.

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