Category Archives: Invoice & Receivable Finance

These are some strange times. Look, we have $16 trillion of negative yielding bonds, that’s T, for trillion. I’m asked by non-financial people why anyone would want to buy negative yields (you pay to hold them, btw) and I reply, it’s not about income, it’s about trading that rates will fall further.

Which got me thinking: If we are in some liquidity trap world and negative interest rate environment, what does that do to all these invoice financial models being built using the latest and greatest in artificial intelligence and machine learning?

Many source-to-pay (S2P) networks struggle to monetize their supplier ecosystem, and a few are looking to change things by using their network data to be more innovative with early pay finance, particularly invoice finance.

For those not familiar with invoice finance, there are three stages where it can be done:

Because P2P solutions started giving away supplier portals, cash flow optimizers, analytics, support, etc., they closed a revenue door. Trying to build a sustainable business model when half your ecosystem is not monetized is very challenging, even as P2P platforms add features and functionality. Sure, many platforms are trying to figure out payments, and that is something that scares the bejeebers out of them due to regulations and compliance rules. (Don’t pay that blacklisted vendor or person, or else.) But payments is not a profitable business for platforms, it’s a service.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ” – Arthur C. Clarke We can credit the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) to George Fuechsel, an […]

I recently had an opportunity to catch up with Chris Hale from Kountable. Kountable is doing some real trade finance, providing preshipment finance to resellers […]

Many of the Fintech lending initiatives have been dead set on helping the poor small business (“SMB”) that in the past had to borrow on […]

At one point in time, GE’s Commercial Distribution Finance Corporation  provided $30 billion in annual inventory financing to the technology, electronics and appliances, powersport, marine, […]

Invoice auctions were a novel and innovative idea a few years back. From a seller’s perspective, auctions provide liquidity, a form of ad hoc, transactional […]

The idea of creating an electronic auction marketplace for investors to purchase assets (in this case invoices, or future dated cash flows), was novel back […]

So far in this series examining finance and procurement alignment, we noted that the coordination between the two functions, especially within the accounts payable and transactional purchasing areas, can bring greater savings opportunities that can be achieved with each individual function pursuing its own initiatives. In particular, we observed that when procurement and accounts payable had aligned systems, processes and goals (ideally in that order) they achieved savings significant beyond what each function can deliver individually.

After giving shareholders an 85% haircut from their trading highs, Tungsten decided to unwind one part of their original IPO strategy – buying a bank […]

I recently revisited a paper I wrote a number of years ago, E-Invoicing Comes of Age - Discovering What's Possible From the Latest Electronic Invoicing / Invoice Automation Capabilities, that covers a number of purchase-to-pay (P2P) fundamentals, including what to prioritize when putting an electronic invoicing program in place. Few of the arguments I make in it are any less relevant today than they were 5 years ago. One of the ideas in the discussion is the importance of addressing quality at the source when it comes to e-invoicing – and putting as much back on the supplier as possible, as well as having an e-invoicing program or supplier network do the heavy lifting with pre-validations before information is directly matched against or integrated with ERP or e-procurement systems.