For Triumph Bancorp, 2020 was the year of TriumphPay.
It is not that the platform for paying carriers was launched during this past year. That goes back to 2017.
It was the year of TriumphPay because many of the major moves the company’s parent, Triumph Bancorp, took over the past 12 months were aimed at building out TriumphPay as an alternative to more traditional factoring. And that is one of the reasons why TriumphPay landed at number 19 on the FreightTech Top 25 for 2020.
The key to its success is bringing a critical mass of both brokers and carriers onto the system. In an interview earlier this year, Luke Wyse, Triumph Bancorp’s director of investor relations, said TriumphPay “embeds itself with the broker to pay all the broker’s carriers and offer a revenue share with the broker for those quick pays that are selected by the carrier. This is cheaper for the carrier and doesn’t require the broker to allocate their balance sheet for an in-house quick pay program.”
The strategic plan for TriumphPay’s growth target can be measured in part by counting the number of brokers on the system as well as carriers. Carriers are brought into the system through the Select Pay platform. The initial signup and app download is free.
As FreightWaves wrote earlier this month, “as more carriers join the Select Carrier program, they are automatically on a broker’s QuickPay program without additional legwork from the broker. All 270+ TriumphPay brokers benefit from the combined network effect of marketing QuickPay to carriers together.” QuickPay is what the company calls factoring.
Earlier this month, the company said it had about 6,500 carriers on the platform. In the third quarter earnings call with analysts, Triumph Bancorp CEO Aaron Graft said the company expected to have 8,000 carriers on the SelectCarrier platform by the end of this year.
The other part of the equation is for TriumphPay to go out and sign up brokers who would use TriumphPay for rapid payment of the carriers they use. Those don’t get signed up by the thousands, but it was a good year.
In October, TriumphPay announced that it had signed a deal to offer its platform through Redwood Logistics’ network of carriers. “Connecting our carriers to TriumphPay is another example of Redwood introducing innovative technology to our key stakeholders that simplifies their processes and increases efficiencies across the board,” James Liakos, Redwood’s CFO, said in announcing the agreement. That sort of language is what TriumphPay will tell you is precisely what they are seeking to do with the product.
TriumphPay also was integrated into the HubTran platform. That service is heavily used in the back offices of 3PLs. It also reached agreement to be embedded into the Transflo platform used by the carriers for truckload giant Schneider National.
In the announcement of Schneider National’s adoption of TriumphPay, the company said traditional ways for carriers to get paid are paper-based and could result in payment 40 days out from the day of the freight movement. It said putting TriumphPay into the Transflo platform could cut that down to as little as two days.
On its third quarter earnings conference call with analysts, Graft spent a great deal of time focused on TriumphPay. He said that as of the end of the third quarter, the period for which the most recent data is available, payments processed through TriumphPay were about $1.2 billion, which was up 74% sequentially from the second quarter and up 510% from the corresponding quarter a year earlier.
The annual run rate through September was $4.8 billion. By the end of 2022, Graft is targeting a run rate for TriumphPay of $25 billion. “That is an achievable goal if you look at our rate of growth, but there’s a lot of work between here and there,” he told the analysts on the call.
Triumph Bancorp officials have pointed out that if a carrier signs up for the Select Carrier program, as soon as a broker it performs work for adds TriumphPay to its offerings, the ability to get paid through TriumphPay with its more rapid pace is effectively established. It just needs to be utilized.
“When you onboard a Tier 1 or even Tier 2 (broker), some of those carriers that are in their system are already Select Carriers or carriers we paid otherwise,” Graft said on the earnings call in discussing how the system can scale up quickly. “We can generate QuickPay revenue from carriers that aren’t Select Carriers. A carrier can certainly select to do that. But when they become a Select Carrier, they are almost treating TriumphPay as their source of financing as long as they’re hauling for a TriumphPay broker.”
TriumphPay is not for everybody. Graft said on the earnings call that “very large” and “medium-sized fleets…will probably be the least likely to move toward a TriumpyPay technology solution.”
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