Many organisations, and especially small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), have frequent cash flow and liquidity problems, often caused by delay in payments by SME´s debtor.

One way to solve this problem is to sell their unpaid invoices to an investor, also called factor, that advances payment already approved by the debtor, but retains a percentage of the total value of the invoice. This process is widely known as invoice factoring and traditionally has been done by large financial entities, involving manual work related to process steps such as invoice confirmation, credit scoring, financial checks, fraud checks etc.  More recently, Fintech companies introduced improvements in this process and, thanks to the innovative use of technologies, reduced time-to-cash for SMEs.  

Invoice factoring is only one possibility of invoice financing that SMEs have, and often there is a need to compare different possibilities, or to match demand to the best offering. As many invoice financing process steps involve multiple stakeholders and cloud services, it is cumbersome to connect and execute related automated workflows. In other words, while the current invoice financing offerings might be effective in satisfying SMEs needs, they are far from being efficient, in terms of finding and executing the optimal invoice financing solution.

OFION is bringing a new improvement and is further reducing time-to-cash, while bringing additional advantages such as trust, best demand/offering match or speed. It is a complete hub for all your invoice financing needs, from the optimal invoice factoring choices and cross-provider workflow execution, to the innovative value-added services for partner and customer onboarding and blockchain-based fraud prevention. OFION is connecting and executing invoice financing workflows spread over multiple stakeholders, including e-invoice service providers, Fintech companies or invoice related cloud services, such as cloud based ERP (enterprise resource planning) or accounting software.

OFION invoice financing hub offers cross-organizational and multi-cloud workflow design and execution control that enables SME to be in the “driving seat” of the whole process. Offerings need to match the SMEs constraints (time, maximum retention percentage etc) in an environment that SMEs is familiar with, with no new tools to be learned. Invoice financing service provider, on the other hand, benefit from business process management (BPM) tool that is deployed “on demand” and across clouds, avoiding therefore the fixed cost of running their own BPM-as-a-Service.  Involvement of further stakeholders, such as e-invoice service providers, is a guarantee of a trustworthy, fast, efficient and decentralized invoice confirmation process, the crucial step in invoice financing.

Benefits for SMEs

  • Flexibility: Full or partial invoice financing with the preferred mix of instruments and providers.
  • Speed: You decide what the deadlines are.
  • Simplicity: With just few clicks your demand for financing will reach many invoice financing providers.