The United States has seen what reliable infrastructure can do for financial markets. In the 1970s, the DTC stabilized equity settlement by creating a single registry of record. In the 1990s, the mortgage industry built MERS to track ownership at scale without relying on county-level filings. Each solved a fundamental data problem. Certificates, assignments, and transfers stopped depending on fragmented local processes and began operating within a unified system. Once the data stabilized, these asset classes became financeable, and two corners of the economy that had been stalling began to move.
Trade receivables, the outstanding invoices that businesses expect to be paid, are stuck in that same pre-infrastructure stage that used to bedevil those other industries. Trustworthy invoice data is scattered across emails, PDFs, and vendor management systems (VMS). Nothing acts as a common reference point. Funders price in the acute uncertainty this creates, and the market thus remains much smaller than it should be. All this potential economic energy for the U.S. is trapped in an opaque “pile of paperwork” rather than circulating throughout the economy.
Other countries show us what can happen when you free up that pent-up energy. Chile pushed receivables funding from under 2 percent of GDP in 2015 to roughly 13 percent by 2021. Brazil now supports more than 150 billion reais through its e-invoicing system, and EU economies operate on invoice funding volumes that regularly sit at around 10 percent of GDP. These ecosystems function because the data is structured, verified, and accessible. These are the preconditions for scaled credit.
But the U.S. is not Chile or Brazil, and receivables are not equities or mortgages. DTC works because equities were already centralized through exchanges and transfer agents; the participants were few, regulated, and obligated to comply. MERS works because the mortgage industry consolidated around a handful of large servicers and funders who could impose a uniform system from the top down. Receivables in the U.S. do not have any of these conditions. There is no central exchange, no regulatory mandate, no concentrated set of actors, and no standardized lifecycle.
So the United States has never built that type of system for trade receivables, and realistically, it never will. There is no political path to a national registry, no unified digital filing framework, no central authority with the mandate or appetite to build one, and no national requirement for businesses to submit invoice-level data anywhere. The economy is too decentralized, state-level rules diverge, and buyers use thousands of incompatible VMS and accounts payable (AP) workflows. The U.S. doesn’t have a natural place to put a registry, and even if one were created, the participation gap would undermine it. A registry that only works when everyone uses it is a poor fit for a market where no one agrees on anything.
Kapwork takes the opposite approach to fix the problem and unlock the capital. Instead of waiting for a federal registry that may never exist, Kapwork focuses on buy-side truth. It verifies that an invoice was actually submitted, received, acknowledged, approved, disputed, scheduled, or paid. It verifies this information inside the buyer’s VMS, such as SAP Ariba or Oracle iSupplier, or by monitoring the AP-facing email accounts where vendors and buyers exchange submission receipts, dispute notices, approval confirmations, payment dates, and remittances. Many buyers communicate through both channels, and in these cases, a complete view requires watching both. Regardless of which trustworthy sources are used, Kapwork’s platform produces a reliable timeline of buyer activity that the vendor cannot fabricate.
A receivable can originate in any ERP, VMS, AP inbox, or file format, and move through thousands of buyer-specific workflows. A centralized registry assumes national participation and mandatory filing. The U.S. can’t get states to standardize basic corporate records, let alone force millions of businesses to submit real-time invoice data. Even private registries struggle with adoption because they rely on the very actors least equipped or least motivated to file. Without comprehensive coverage, a registry doesn’t actually fix the market. The fragmentation that makes a registry attractive is the same fragmentation that ensures it won’t work here.
Kapwork operates continuously. If a buyer updates the VMS or sends an email changing the status, Kapwork captures it immediately. A registry, if one ever appeared, would only validate a collateral report (“tape”) at funding or reporting. Kapwork shows how receivables are performing within buyers’ systems.
If a funder had to choose one: registry or buy-side truth, the immediate protection against asset-level fraud comes from Kapwork’s buy-side truth. Verification from the buyer’s own system reduces the largest day-to-day uncertainty. Cross-facility integrity matters, but in a country that cannot or will not build a federally adopted registry, the only scalable solution is to verify the asset itself at the source of truth. Recent failures show that fake invoices and double pledging often occur together. But the United States is structurally mismatched to the registry model; Kapwork is not. Kapwork provides buyer verification in a way that fits the market as it is, not as it would need to be for a registry to work.
Once a receivable is verified, it becomes usable collateral. That changes asset-based lending (ABL) as well. Traditional ABL relies on borrowing base certificates produced weekly or monthly. These are snapshots. Between reporting cycles, the funder has no visibility into changes. A system powered by Kapwork turns the borrowing base into a live dataset. The platform continuously ingests invoice and payment information from VMS records and AP email threads. Availability reflects the receivable's state as of the current moment, not two weeks ago.
This allows eligibility rules to become deterministic. If an invoice enters dispute in the buyer’s VMS, it is removed from the borrowing base immediately. If a buyer breaches a concentration threshold, new invoices from that buyer are given a "haircut" or excluded. The signals come directly from the buyer. Aging no longer depends on fixed buckets. Eligibility decays when the buyer stops performing.
With Kapwork, this live view can be shared. The invoice owner and funder see the same pool, the same status changes, and the same eligibility outcomes. Arguments over spreadsheets disappear. Automation becomes possible: instant pre-trade checks, automatic funding approvals, and real-time covenant testing. Operational overhead collapses because the inputs are standardized and buyer (debtor)-derived.
Kapwork delivers the infrastructure the U.S. is missing. It does not depend on national mandates, industry consolidation, or universal participation. It connects directly to the systems where buyer truth already lives and turns that truth into a financeable signal. Instead of waiting for a registry that will never materialize or relying on one with inherently weak coverage, Kapwork makes receivables verifiable, monitorable, and usable today. It gives funders certainty, gives invoice owners transparency, and unlocks the capital trapped inside the most common asset that U.S. businesses produce.