Digital trade platform rich with physical and financial supply chain data creates new opportunities to fund suppliers
Infor has announced that it is partnering with DBS Bank, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, to integrate digital trade financing capabilities into the Infor Nexus global network of more than 68,000 businesses.
The two companies’ first joint program recently went live with one of the world’s largest global apparel companies, providing faster and more cost-efficient digital trade financing to suppliers in the apparel company’s supply chain ecosystem, which comprises mostly small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Data-driven financing
“This is an important relationship for Infor, where a common vision of data-driven financing bonds us and presses us forward,” said Gary Schneider, vice president of sales for Infor Financial Supply Chain Management. “DBS is a digital bank, based in Asia, focused on supplier funding and liquidity. Its pursuit of digital innovation and delivering greater value to supply chains, combined with our cloud-based platform and local support team around the globe, makes for a powerful partnership at a time when liquidity is a top priority for everyone.”
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Sriram Muthukrishnan, group head of trade product management at DBS Bank, said: “We continue to accelerate the deployment of our market-leading supply chain financing and digital capabilities to ensure steady financing to SME suppliers during these times of stress. Data forms the backbone of a successful digital strategy, and its impact across multiple industries globally has been growing exponentially.
Transparency and supplier insights
“Our collaboration with Infor enables greater transparency into complex supply chains and provides insights into the transaction patterns between an anchor and its ecosystem of suppliers,” he noted. “We leverage these insights to provide quicker and more cost-efficient financing to suppliers much earlier in the cycle, as compared to conventional post-shipment supplier financing programs. This is especially relevant today, as we continue to operate in an environment characterized by prolonged trade disruptions and tighter credit lines, where optimal working capital management is key to survival.”
The two companies’ next joint program for pre-shipment finance, expected to launch in late 2020, will utilize supply chain data as the primary conduit to assess risk and credit worthiness, as opposed to traditional models that result in the majority of suppliers being underfunded or facing challenges to access necessary capital. Infor provides extensive supply chain data, including historic and real-time milestone information on the physical movement of goods to enable a data-driven representation of a supplier’s performance and credit risk.
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Risk profile
According to a research report from Aite Group analyst Enrico Camerinelli (The Supply Chain Bank, 2018): “In the next three years, the competitive frontier in corporate lending and supply chain finance will be the creation of innovative credit risk models that banks will use to leverage corporate supply chain process data. Banks will capture and analyze events in the physical supply chain (source-to-pay, order-to-cash) in order to generate a more comprehensive and realistic representation of a company’s risk profile.”
