This year, the Eurofinance conference was held in Barcelona – and we were invited by the organisers to participate in the Innovation Hub.
Whilst it would be lovely to think that attendees would wander by our stand in order to see what’s new in the market, most attendees quite sensibly keep themselves to themselves, attend the important sessions and hang out with their key existing relationships. After all, who wants to be pounced on by tenacious sales people looking to pump their product proposition – especially in a market like corporate treasury and cash management where not very much new happens.
After all, think about it – when was the last time a significant innovation came to this market?
Eurofinance: we have something to say.
At Prima, we are innovators but also now with a supply chain platform that is tried and tested in the market and delivering real value to our clients.
As McKinsey said in their most recent report on the supply chain finance market:
“Significant value in the global supply-chain finance (SCF) market remains untapped. Nearly 80 percent of eligible assets do not benefit from better working-capital financing, and the remaining one-fifth of assets are often inefficiently financed.”
We extend and automate SCF programs
Our platform is powered by supplier data: each time suppliers ship, they self-digitise all their paperwork (BLs, packing lists, invoices, ESG certificates, proofs of source and context etc). This delivers amazing structured data without needing integration, IT project work or going near corporate ERP environments.
There are multiple pain points in buyer organisations that we can quickly solve at enterprise level using this new, actionable data-source across working capital management, SCF, cash flow and FX visibility, logistics and ESG.
In SCF programs, we use supplier data to automate the approval of invoices for early payment at shipment - and to handle the complexity of supplier debit notes. This capability will unlock the true potential of SCF that McKinsey was talking about.
What about existing SCF programs?
Many corporates and banks have existing SCF programs and platforms in place.
There is no need to disturb these arrangements – we can simply upgrade them and make them work bigger, better and faster. We simply replace the “approved payables” feed from the corporate ERP(s) with an approved payables feed generated automatically from our platform instead – and this can be done at enterprise level because supplier data is at enterprise level.
Solving significant pain in SCF
Our approach deals with the significant pain that many corporate clients face when operating SCF programs and which limits the reach and scope of their programs.
Using our approach, enterprise-level SCF can be delivered with high levels of automation and efficiency no matter how many ERPs, subsidiaries, suppliers, countries, logistics providers etc. are involved – and invoices can be automatically approved for SCF at shipment.
For a bank or an existing SCF platform provider, our innovations lead to quick wins. Existing SCF programs can easily be upsized and made more efficient - and new clients can be won without needing ERP integration projects. Many clients have multiple ERPs and so SCF is limited only to those parts of the organisation where connectivity and process has been built. With Prima, we remove these limitations enabling programs to be established across the entire enterprise and moving payment approvals much earlier to when a supplier ships.
ESG - we operationalize your ESG requirements
SCF is not the only business need that we address with our platform. There is an emerging requirement for most businesses to request, collect and check documents from their suppliers about the ESG characteristics of the products being supplied - what they are made of, who made them, where the materials came from, how much energy and carbon was involved etc.
Our platform also solves this ESG need. You can request documents from your suppliers, we collect them, digitize them, sanity-check them and store them - and this can be at massive scale. We are already digitizing over 10,000 documents a month for our clients in the UK alone.
Eurofinance feedback
Across two days of “hard conferencing” we spoke directly to around 100 corporates, banks and platforms about the innovations that we have proven with existing clients and how these can translate directly into solutions that improve the current SCF experience:
A number of banks and platforms are now working with us directly on a “wrap around” strategy where our platform sits on the corporate client side and is used to automate and extend existing SCF programs.
Quite a significant number of corporate treasury and procurement specialists have agreed follow up calls with us to understand more about how we:
Can expand existing SCF programs so that they are more effective and more inclusive whilst also keeping the current platforms and funder processes in place.
Solve data fragmentation issues that they experience – one treasury professional told us that they have 33 ERPs and have been unable to get an SCF program into place simply because there is no enterprise-level view – something that we address easily with our supplier-data approach.
Address upcoming ESG requirements to capture, digitise and automatically check paperwork from suppliers on the products they are sourcing – product-by-product.
Our final word: branded giveaways!
Many of you may have read about our policy on branded corporate giveaways from our stand – and the fact that we proposed to give our budget for this to charity.
We are pleased to confirm that, based on the conference and the traction that we achieved, there will be a healthy donation going to a charity that is actively involved in mitigating the effects of climate change.
See you next year at Eurofinance!