Future Payments Challenge Winners Announced – Two Startups Set to Reshape B2B Payments
The Digital Trust Centre is delighted to announce Stableport and Stabledrop as the winners of its Future Payments Challenge - two ambitious Scottish-based companies set to reshape how businesses move money.
The Future Payments Challenge launched in February with a focused question: how do we digitise SME trade finance and unlock the capital trapped in slow, costly B2B payments? The response was global, with applications received from companies as far as Fiji, Dubai and the UK, and five teams advancing to the Exploration Phase: M8 Industries, Stableport, Tesseract Academy, ProofSettle, and Stabledrop.
After a standout Final Pitch Showcase at Edinburgh Napier’s Merchiston Campus on 6 May, two winners were selected: Stableport and Stabledrop. Both now move into the Development Phase with funding to take their solutions to the next stage.
Stabledrop – Turning locked invoices into working capital
£27.7 billion is currently locked up in late and unpaid invoices owed to Scottish businesses, equivalent to 13% of Scotland’s GDP. Stabledrop is taking that on, with funding and support from the Digital Trust Centre. Their platform uses smart contracts to lock buyer funds at inception, and is developing atomic swaps so suppliers can access locked capital immediately, without paying for credit risk. The result: a contractor who would otherwise have turned down a job because they couldn’t fund it can now say yes.
“The money’s helpful, the connections are priceless…
This grant allows us to build the liquidity product to accelerate the Scottish economy by unlocking the capital in invoices”
Stableport – Putting Scottish SMEs on the faster side of global trade
Days of delay, surprise fees, and money sitting in limbo – for Scottish SMEs paying suppliers abroad or waiting on payment from overseas, traditional international banking still gets in the way. Stableport is changing that. By using stablecoin payment rails instead of traditional international banking, Stableport eliminates the delays and high fees associated with paying suppliers or getting paid abroad, making long waits and surprise costs a thing of the past.
“Winning the Future Payments Challenge is a significant milestone for Stableport. Beyond the funding, the value lies in the ecosystem connections and the validation of Stableport’s approach to modernising cross-border payments for Scottish SMEs. The goal is simple: give Scottish businesses a faster, lower-cost way to settle international invoices, and help put Scotland at the forefront of practical payment innovation that makes a real difference to companies on the ground”
Convening Academia, Industry and the Public Sector to Move Ideas to Market
Ahead of the live Pitch Showcase, the finalists spent two days in intensive workshops, working with leaders from across academia, industry and the public sector – before pitching to an expert judging panel and bidding for up to £50,000 of development funding.
This is what the Digital Trust Centre is built to do. As a tri-university initiative bringing together Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow – in partnership with FinTech Scotland and supported by Scottish Enterprise – the Centre convenes the people who can move ideas from research to real-world impact. The Future Payments Challenge is a clear demonstrations of what that model can deliver.
Stableport and Stabledrop now move into the Development Phase, where the Centre’s wider network of partners, researchers and industry connections continues to back them as they take their solutions to market.
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