Saible Raises £2.9M to Solve What Project Bank Accounts Couldn’t

Saible has raised £2.9 million (about $3.9 million at current exchange rates) to change how money moves through Britain’s construction industry, one project at a time. The Birmingham fintech wants every tier of a supply chain paid on the same day, not weeks apart, in a sector where late payment costs the UK economy an estimated £11 billion a year.

The pitch has history behind it. Project Bank Accounts, or PBAs, tried a similar fix more than fifteen years ago, ring-fencing money so every supplier got paid at once. Government’s own figures show the mechanism reached only a fraction of major contracts, and some of construction’s most powerful executives fought to keep it that way.

How Does Saible’s Parallel Payment System Work?

Saible’s Digital Parallel Payment Account, known as DiPPA, holds project funds in trust with a regulated bank and releases them to every approved tier of a supply chain at the same moment. That replaces the usual model, where money cascades from the main contractor down to subcontractors and then to the smallest suppliers, often with a delay at every stop. Project owners pay a fee of 0.25 per cent of the payment value. The supply chain pays nothing.

The Birmingham company was built around a single idea: construction’s payment problem is really about how money moves through a project. Chief executive Jarvey Moss founded Saible in 2023. The £2.9 million total comprises £2.1 million raised earlier plus a fresh £800,000 from angel investors.

Alongside that round, Saible is opening a limited £50,000 allocation on Crowdcube from 15 July to 31 July, letting smaller construction firms and industry figures invest alongside its existing backers.

• Funds sit in a ring-fenced trust with Griffin, a UK bank authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, rather than passing through a contractor’s own account.
• Every payment claim is approved, verified and audited through the Saible app before money moves.
• Approved firms across every tier, from the main contractor down to the smallest supplier, are paid at the same moment, instead of waiting for the tier above to forward funds.

Eligible deposits held with Griffin are protected up to £120,000 per depositor under the FSCS, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme that covers an ordinary UK bank account.

Saible is not alone chasing this problem. Prolo, a London fintech, has raised £4.2 million to give contractors 90 days of credit on the procurement side. ProjectPay, founded the same year as Saible by Australian entrepreneur Louise Stewart, pursues transparency through a different mechanism entirely.

Late Payment Costs UK Construction £11 Billion a Year

On a large project, funds can pass through four or five companies before reaching the people doing the work. At each stage, a payment can be delayed or withheld, often because the firm holding it treats the money as free credit for its own operations.

Research from accountancy firm Menzies found that 93 per cent of construction and property firms report late payment, with invoices averaging 53 days overdue. It found 86 per cent are already in, or close to, serious financial distress.

When ISG collapsed in 2024, it left more than £1.1 billion in unpaid debts, with hundreds of subcontractors unpaid for completed work. The failure, the biggest in UK construction since Carillion, put more than 2,200 jobs at risk overnight.

• 93% of UK construction and property firms report late payment, according to Menzies.
• 53 days is the average length invoices run overdue in the sector.
• 4,450 construction firms failed in 2025, up 9 per cent, with another 1,180 collapsing in the first quarter of 2026.
• £1.1 billion or more in unpaid debts were left behind when ISG collapsed in 2024.

More recent figures show some easing but no reversal. 3,803 insolvencies were recorded in the year to May 2026, according to the Building Cost Information Service, six per cent fewer than the year before but still 18 per cent above pre-pandemic levels. BCIS chief economist Dr David Crosthwaite said risk levels remain elevated, “particularly for smaller contractors and specialist subcontractors, which often bear the brunt of tighter margins and cash flow pressures.”

Pressure is building in Parliament too. A Commercial Payments Bill introduced in May 2026, now at second reading in the House of Lords, would ban retention payments, cap payment terms at 60 days and add a mandatory interest rate of eight percentage points above base rate on late payments.

A 2009 Fix That Never Scaled

Saible is picking up an old fight. In September 2009, the Government Construction Board proposed that public projects adopt PBAs unless there were compelling reasons not to. By 2014, then Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced that £5.2 billion of government construction work, including Crossrail, was being paid through the mechanism.

The idea works much like DiPPA in outline. A ring-fenced account pays every tier of a supply chain directly and at the same time, so a subcontractor does not have to wait for a main contractor to pass the money on. Government estimated the approach could shave 1 per cent off project costs.

Uptake never matched the ambition. A Freedom of Information request found that nine of 80 major contracts used the mechanism across the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Health since January 2022, despite Cabinet Office rules requiring it. Rudi Klein, a barrister and former chief executive of the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ Group, called the gap “inexcusable,” given that the Cabinet Office “accepts that PBAs are an effective method for speeding up payments and reducing losses from upstream insolvencies.”

Industry bodies have their own list of complaints. Guidance from the Building Engineering Services Association notes that PBAs are designed to protect only the signing parties, leaving smaller subcontractors with minor work packages outside the ring fence, and cites estimates that 10 per cent of small and medium sized enterprise (SME) collapses stem from late or non-payment.

Moss has made a similar case about why the older model struggled. “Traditional PBAs are hard to set up. They take a long time to open,” he said, adding that high street banks “don’t like the trust structure and they don’t like the fact that the money doesn’t stay in the account for very long so they can’t lend against the deposits.”

The Float Problem

Not every executive in construction wants faster, simultaneous payment. The same float that Saible is trying to eliminate has, for years, cushioned contractors running on thin margins.

When ISG collapsed, it had been operating on a margin of roughly 2 per cent, on a turnover of £2.18 billion and a pre-tax profit of just £11.5 million in its final published accounts. That is the kind of arithmetic that makes a main contractor reluctant to hand over control of cash the moment it lands.

The objection is not hypothetical.

If everyone starts doing PBAs you will see a lot more people going into administration.

Mark Reynolds, chief executive of Mace and co-chair of the Construction Leadership Council, told Construction News in 2023, adding that he was “dead against” including Project Bank Accounts in the government’s Construction Playbook. PBAs, he argued, are “very costly to set up, bureaucratic.” They do little to fix the real problem, he said. If a tier one contractor is not earning enough money in the first place, losing access to that cash makes its own position worse. It does nothing to govern payment terms for the tiers below it.

The same argument surfaced a decade earlier. Paul Sheffield, then chief executive of Kier, said in 2014 that PBAs made it “impossible for tier one contractors to generate significant cash surplus on projects.” He asked why a firm would “get out of bed for 1% or 2%” if it could no longer generate the cash flow it once relied on.

A Footbridge Becomes the First Real Test

Saible’s answer to that skepticism is to test the model on live projects rather than argue about it. The company is working with the Environment Agency and BAM Nuttall on public sector pilots designed to trial its payment control model on government backed construction work.

The Environment Agency announced two pilot projects with main contractor BAM Nuttall in November, part of a wider effort examined by a Cabinet Office sponsored group looking at construction payment problems. Andy Judson, BAM Nuttall’s client director, said the team is “exploring a smarter, more secure future for project payments that strengthens suppliers’ resilience and confidence in future capital projects.”

The first pilot is expected to be a footbridge replacement worth £1.5 million to £2 million, due to start in summer 2026 and run for 12 to 16 months. It is designed to generate early evidence on payment visibility, supplier timing and how far down the chain protection actually reaches.

Phil Brown, founder and executive chair of Causeway Technologies and a Saible investor, said Project Bank Accounts “recognised the right problem, but they were never built to protect payment all the way down the supply chain.” Causeway, Brown’s own company, sells software used on PBA compliant projects and is backed by investment firm Five Arrows Principal Investments.

Two Data Sets, One Unresolved Argument

Not every dataset agrees on how bad construction’s payment problem really is. Menzies’ survey work puts 93 per cent of firms in the sector among those experiencing late payment. Government figures published this week complicate that picture.

Large construction firms paid one in seven invoices late during 2025, according to Department for Business and Trade (DBT) statistics published on 14 July. That was close to the 15 per cent late payment rate across all large UK businesses.

Construction firms took a median of 33 days to pay suppliers, one day longer than the all sector average. The sector ranked around the middle of the table for payment performance overall.

The two figures are measuring different things. The DBT data covers only large businesses reporting their own payment practices under statutory duty. Menzies surveyed the wider sector, including the small and mid-sized firms most exposed to being paid late by the businesses above them. Both things can be true at once: construction’s biggest firms may pay reasonably close to terms, even as money moves too slowly once it reaches the companies further down the chain.

That is the seam Saible is trying to close with DiPPA, simultaneous payment reaching every tier, not just the ones large enough to show up in government statistics. Whether it succeeds where Project Bank Accounts stalled will not be clear until the footbridge project wraps, somewhere between mid-2027 and the end of that year.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Equity crowdfunding carries risk, including possible loss of capital, and is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the way bank deposits are. Figures are accurate as of publication; readers considering an investment should seek independent financial advice.