Trade and distribution
Thin margins make timing everything.
When you earn a few points on a large number, every extra day of working capital costs real money. We fund the invoice so your cash turns as fast as your stock does.
Importers, exporters, wholesalers and distributors across APAC corridors.
Why it fits
Your margin is a function of how fast the cash comes back.
Distribution economics are about velocity, not markup. A few points on a shipment is a good business if the cash returns and does it again quickly, and a poor one if each cycle takes four months. Payment terms are therefore not an administrative detail — they are most of the return.
The structural problem is that you pay suppliers on their terms and get paid on your buyers', and the difference is funded out of your own pocket. Growing volume widens that gap proportionally, so scale makes the squeeze worse rather than better.
Funding per invoice rather than against a fixed limit matches this. The facility expands with shipped volume, each drawing retires when its buyer settles, and you are not paying for headroom you are not using in a slow month.
- Funding per invoice, expanding with volume rather than by annual review
- Cash back in days instead of at the end of the buyer's terms
- Pay suppliers early where the discount beats the financing cost
Documents
What back-to-back trades need.
Distribution paperwork is usually clean. Where it gets complicated is transhipment, chains of parties, and goods that never touch your warehouse.
- 01 Purchase and sale contracts
- Both sides of a back-to-back trade. We need to see the trade you are actually in, not just the invoice you raised.
- 02 The right consignee
- Direct shipment from your supplier to your buyer is normal in this sector. It just needs to be visible in the documents rather than looking like a mismatch.
- 03 Transhipment documentation
- Where cargo changes vessel or is consolidated, the chain has to be traceable from origin to your buyer's delivery point.
- 04 Title and risk, by incoterm
- Whether you owned the goods, and when risk passed, determines whether the receivable existed on your invoice date. Incoterms are not boilerplate here.
- 05 Warehouse receipts, if goods are stored
- For goods held in a third-party facility between purchase and sale, the receipt and its issuer both matter.
- 06 One goods description, throughout
- The same wording from purchase contract to sale invoice to bill of lading. In a chain of four documents, one rewording creates a discrepancy.
Questions
What traders and distributors ask.
We ship directly from supplier to buyer and never hold the goods. Is that fundable?
Yes. Back-to-back and drop-shipped trades are common here. What we need is the chain documented — both contracts and a shipping document that ties origin to your buyer's delivery point.
Can you fund the purchase leg as well as the sale?
Invoice finance funds the sale leg — your receivable. Funding the purchase is pre-shipment or trade loan territory, which is a different product with different risk. We will tell you plainly if it is outside what we can do.
We have dozens of small buyers rather than a few big ones. Does that work?
It works well, and the diversification helps. Each buyer is assessed, and small buyers are assessed more lightly than a large concentrated exposure would be.
Our margins are thin. Will the financing cost eat them?
That is the right question to ask, and the arithmetic is straightforward: compare the cost of financing one invoice for its actual tenor against the margin on that trade. If it does not work we will tell you. Where it usually does work is when the cash lets you run more cycles a year.
Can you handle commodity price movement between purchase and sale?
The receivable is fixed once the sale invoice is raised, so post-invoice price moves do not affect it. Contracts that settle on a price at destination create a variable receivable — flag those, and they are funded at a lower advance rate.
How many corridors can we run through one facility?
Multiple. The constraint is which jurisdictions we can operate in rather than how many you use, and we will tell you which of your corridors are in and which are out before you onboard.
Sectors we know
Start small
Send us one trade.
Both sides of a single trade and the buyer's name. We will tell you what we could advance, which corridors we can cover, and roughly what it would cost.
- An indicative answer, usually the same day
- A clear read on which of your corridors we can serve
- No cost and no obligation to draw