For the third consecutive year, Alvantia has participated in the Supply Chain Finance Summit, which was held this year in Frankfurt on 31 January and 1 February. The event, organized by BCR, aims to share the latest trends in the SCF industry both nationally and internationally.
José Antonio Garrote, Business Manager at Alvantia, addressed the opening of Supply Chain Finance to SMEs, a point very focused on commercialization to Corporates. During his speech, he explained to this forum (consisting of financial institutions, service providers and corporations) the differences that companies willing to commercialize to SMEs should make in their product offers.
This year’s program has been largely led by Blockchain and by the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). Why is this technology announced as one of the great innovations for the industry? Blockchain is a distributed database that is made up of chains of blocks. These are designed to avoid their modification once a data has been published, by using a reliable time stamp and by linking to a previous block.
Its ability to transmit information between two parts with a self-verifying encryption makes this technology especially interesting for the communication of information related to the physical supply chain. Its first implementation has been for the transmission between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
As on previous occasions, the forum sparked again the debate on what Supply Chain Finance is. According to experts, the Confirming® model created by Banco Santander in Spain is payables financing. However, Supply Chain Financing could go from the generation of the order and ultimately include invoices financing.
The first day of the meeting closed with FCI‘s intervention. The global Factoring and Financing association presented its FCI Reverse project, an SCF platform through which the 4-corner model is developed. This model exists for Factoring but it has not been developed yet in this product.
During the forum, the success points of an SCF implementation were established. These would be the supplier’s appetite, the easiness of the supplier’s on-boarding process and the commercial offers. Likewise, speakers analyzed the companies’ growing interest in the implementation of a SCF solution and the absolute satisfaction of companies that have already implemented a Supply Chain Finance solution in any modality.
In summary, the Supply Chain Finance Summit has offered a meeting point to exchange impressions among the main companies in the sector, and Alvantia was glad to contribute to the definition of the future of the industry.
