A disruptive supply chain finance vendor 15 years later – who is Orbian?

Orbian was one of the first companies to really start the ball rolling with supply chain finance.  It was conceived and developed in the late 1990’s as a joint venture between SAP and Citibank and became independent a few years later.  Orbian’s sole focus is to provide a supply chain finance working capital solution for corporates.  Orbian’s SCF model was built to provide an agnostic funding model to large corporations and their suppliers, in essence eliminating the dependency on single bank funded programs.  Their stated objective is to create the lowest cost, greatest capacity and greatest security of liquidity upon which the buyer’s working capital goals can be achieved.

Orbian successfully launched the first proprietary U.S. Capital Markets funding program in 2004 through the Orbian Special Purpose Entity (SPE). Each Buyer program is funded through a separate Orbian SPE, which, in turn, fund themselves through the issuance of notes (cleared through DTCC or Euroclear) and sold to banks and investors. Suppliers are never exposed to individual funders. At the moment, the vast majority of funding comes from Banks or Corporates themselves buying Orbian notes at Libor plus.

So how are they doing 15 years later?