Supplier finance
Pay later. They get paid sooner.
Extend your terms to 120 days while your suppliers are funded within two — at a rate set by your credit standing, not theirs. Both sides end up better off, which is why this works at all.
Also called reverse factoring, or payables finance. Same thing.
The problem
Terms are a zero-sum fight until someone changes the rate.
Your treasury wants to pay in 120 days. Your suppliers want to be paid in 30. Every negotiation between those two positions just moves the strain from one balance sheet to the other, and the strain lands hardest on the small suppliers you can least afford to lose.
Supplier finance breaks the deadlock by changing the price of the money rather than the direction of the pressure. A financier pays your supplier days after you approve the invoice, and you settle on day 120. Because the funding is priced on your creditworthiness, a supplier who would borrow at 14% gets funded at something much closer to your cost of money.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being precise about it: this is only a genuinely two-sided deal when your credit is meaningfully better than your suppliers'. If it is not, you are just extending terms with extra steps, and you should say so rather than dress it up.
- Longer days payable without renegotiating a single contract
- Suppliers funded in days, at a rate they could not get alone
- Optional for suppliers — a programme they have to join is a term extension
How it works
You approve. We pay. You settle later.
The programme sits on top of your existing purchase-to-pay process. Your suppliers keep invoicing you the way they always have.
- 01
We onboard your suppliers
Identity checks, bank details and the agreement, handled on the platform. This is the step that decides whether a programme succeeds — if enrolling takes six weeks of paperwork, most suppliers will not bother.
- 02
You approve invoices as usual
Through your own ERP or accounts-payable process. An approved invoice is the trigger; no separate instruction is needed from you per invoice.
- 03
Suppliers choose to be paid early
Each supplier decides, invoice by invoice, whether to take early payment or wait for your due date. They see the cost before they accept.
- 04
You pay on the extended date
One consolidated settlement to us on the agreed date. Your cash conversion cycle lengthens; your suppliers' shortens.
Indicative programme terms
- Up to 120 days
- Payment terms you can extend to
- 1–2 days
- From your approval to your supplier being paid
- 100 %
- Of the approved invoice available to the supplier
- Days not weeks
- To onboard a supplier onto the programme
Indicative only. Terms, pricing and supplier eligibility depend on your credit standing, the jurisdictions involved, and the structure your auditor signs off.
On one invoice
Both sides move at once.
A $500,000 invoice you would normally pay in 30 days, extended to 120, with the supplier taking early payment.
Your supplier's 28 days early are the same 90 days you gained. Nobody paid for it twice.
- Day 0 Supplier invoices you; you approve $500,000
- Day 2 Supplier is paid, less their discount $500,000
- Day 120 You settle with the financier $500,000
- Net Extra days of cash you keep 90 days
Illustrative, not a quote. The supplier's discount depends on your credit standing, the tenor and the currency.
Before you commit
Three questions to settle first.
Is the accounting treatment agreed? Whether an extended payable stays a trade payable or gets reclassified as debt depends on the structure and on your auditor's view of it. Get that opinion in writing before you launch, not after your first year-end.
Can you actually enrol a small supplier quickly? The suppliers who benefit most from programme pricing are the smallest ones, who are also the hardest to onboard. If the process is a PDF pack and a month of chasing, the programme will cover your five largest suppliers — the ones who needed it least — and nothing else.
Is it optional, and does it look optional? Suppliers read a mandatory programme as a term extension with a friendly name, and it damages exactly the relationships you were trying to protect. Give them the rate as a number for their invoice size, and let them decline.
- Your auditor's view on classification, before launch
- Supplier onboarding measured in days, or the programme stays small
- Genuinely optional, invoice by invoice, with the cost shown up front
Running a programme
What we handle, and what stays yours.
You keep the supplier relationships and the buying decisions. We take the parts that turn into administrative drag.
- 01 Supplier onboarding
- Identity and bank verification, agreements and e-signature, in a portal your suppliers can use without training.
- 02 Your ERP, not a new one
- Approved-invoice feeds in through API or file exchange. Nobody re-keys anything.
- 03 Per-invoice choice
- Suppliers accept or decline early payment individually, and see the cost before accepting.
- 04 One settlement to make
- A consolidated payment on the agreed date instead of hundreds of supplier payments.
- 05 Ongoing screening
- Sanctions and PEP checks through a specialist provider, at onboarding and on a schedule after it, across every supplier in the programme.
- 06 Reporting your treasury can use
- Programme utilisation, supplier adoption, days payable, and an audit trail per invoice.
Questions
What buyers and suppliers ask.
Will this be treated as debt on our balance sheet?
It depends on the structure and on your auditor. Extending terms materially beyond your industry norm, or guaranteeing the financier, both push towards reclassification. We will walk your finance team and auditor through the structure in detail — but the opinion has to be theirs, not ours, and you should get it before launch.
What does it cost my suppliers?
A discount on the invoice for the days between early payment and your due date, priced against your credit standing. Each supplier sees the exact figure before accepting, per invoice. You can also choose to bear some or all of that cost yourself.
Do all our suppliers have to join?
No, and we would push back on a design where they did. Adoption is per supplier and acceptance is per invoice.
How many suppliers can we put through it?
There is no practical ceiling on the platform side. The real constraint is onboarding throughput, which is why we treat that as the main engineering problem rather than an administrative afterthought.
What happens if we do not pay on the due date?
That is a default under your agreement with the financier, and it is handled there. Your supplier has already been paid and is not exposed to it — which is the point of the structure from their side.
Can this work across several countries and currencies?
Yes. Suppliers can be funded and paid in their own currency while you settle in yours, through the same multi-currency rails the rest of the platform uses.
How is this different from dynamic discounting?
Dynamic discounting uses your own cash to pay early in exchange for a discount — no financier, and your cash goes out sooner. Supplier finance uses someone else's balance sheet, so your cash goes out later. They solve opposite problems.
Next
Bring us your payables file.
Spend, terms and a supplier list is enough for us to show you which suppliers a programme would actually help, what it would cost them, and how many days you would gain.
- Modelled on your real spend, not an industry average
- A straight answer on whether your credit spread makes this worth doing
- The onboarding timeline per supplier, before you commit