Verticys Pte Ltd – Intern (InvoiceNxt Customer Support)

Looking for interns with an interest in Fintech and specifically Supply Chain Finance

About Verticys

Verticys is on a mission to revolutionise supply chain finance with sustainability at its core of values. We are an early-stage start-up with currently six full-time employees, all serial founders and seniors in their respective fields. Our core solution is called InvoiceNxt, which is designed to solve the financing needs of supply chains, especially in emerging markets, for good.

The Team

• Volkmar Ahrens, more than 20 years in digitalization and process automation
• Kevin Yu, founder and technical architect of eInvoice.sg, an e-Invoicing platform used by more than 6,000 corporates
• Pooja Dargan Ahrens, 15 years of experience in corporate marketing
• Maex Ament, founder and ex-CTO of Taulia
• Alfred Aloysius, procurement and logistic professional (CPO SMRT/SATS/ComfortDelGro)

The problem

• Four reasons exclude most suppliers (>95%) from accessing any form of supply chain financing:
• Origination costs
• Fraud risk
• Collection risk
• Processing costs
• Lenders (banks as much as alternative lenders) mitigate these risks by focusing on large transaction volumes only. Usually, any transaction volume less than USD 20,000 will not be considered for financing from the formal sector. Considering that the average invoice size in Asia is USD 5,000, it is obvious why there is such a low financing rate (of GDP: India 0.001%, Malaysia 1%, Indonesia < 1%, Singapore outstanding at around 15%, world-average 12%, all values from 2018)

InvoiceNxt

• InvoiceNxt eliminates origination- and processing costs as much as fraud- and collection risks. Our platform makes it possible to offer early payment either from the corporate buyer’s (“Early payment discount”) or a lender’s balance sheet (“Supply chain financing”) for the smallest invoice amounts. The entire process is automated without any marginal costs.
• InvoiceNxt makes supplier finance much simpler for all parties: Using already existing data from corporate ERP systems, applying pre-defined discounting rules, automatically locking invoices in case of third-party funding, and automating the payment process makes it possible to scale indefinitely and handle thousands of transactions per day without compromising in respect to compliance. Suppliers can receive payments immediately (technically within seconds) with a single click. Payment certainly and convenience become as important as access to working capital on fair terms.

Various supplier groups

• InvoiceNxt allows specifying discounting rules per supplier or supplier group.
• Large suppliers (~5% of the supply chain) already enjoy SCF offered by banks (Citi, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered). These suppliers see SCF as an alternative source of working capital, often at comparatively better terms, with fewer efforts, and no effect on existing credit lines. This group expects highly competitive terms; however, the transaction volumes are generally high, which justifies the efforts despite small margins. While SCF for these suppliers benefits from InvoiceNxt’s mechanics (100% automation), these suppliers will often work offline.
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• Today, medium-sized suppliers are the target audience of alternative lenders (Validus, Funding Societies, etc.). The suppliers experience supply chain financing as expensive and complicated. With InvoiceNxt, effortless SCF can be offered on significantly better terms.
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• Small suppliers have no access to any form of supplier finance at all, this is true across the world and especially in emerging markets. InvoiceNxt allows early (“immediate”) invoice payment for this supplier group on fair terms, even for the smallest volumes. These suppliers will consider early payment mostly to provide payment certainty and eliminate collection efforts.

Engaging suppliers

• A key to the success of InvoiceNxt is the onboarding and engagement of suppliers. Our target audience is large multinational buyers with more than 5,000 suppliers, we aim to get at least 60% of the supply chain to use InvoiceNxt actively.
• To ensure engagement, InvoiceNxt presents itself as a full-fledged supplier self-service platform, allowing suppliers simple access to all information from RFQ to payment. Suppliers can use the platform to raise invoices, see the status of already raised invoices, the status of purchase orders, deliveries, and the consumption of goods in consignment – all from the desktop or mobile devices. This in return reduces manual efforts and costs on the buyers’ side: Much fewer inquiries, and much better data.
• Currently, our hybrid onboarding and outreach processes have more than 30 touchpoints to get the attention of the suppliers. Onboarding and outreach are provided as a part of our service offering at no cost to the lender or the buyer.
• ESG and Scope 3 net-zero target initiatives
• Corporates’ environmental, social, and governance concepts need to be ensured throughout the entire global supply chain.
• InvoiceNxt is the platform to communicate corporate ESG-standards and validate suppliers’ alignment. Even more, buyers can easily incentivize suppliers for their ESG-contribution.
• While all ESG-aspects are covered in InvoiceNxt, a special emphasis is placed on carbon emissions and the challenge to develop science-based initiatives to drive the supply chain (“Scope 3”) to net zero, either by reducing and/or offsetting emissions.

Audiences

• InvoiceNxt is a network of suppliers, buyers, and lenders. All three parties can access InvoiceNxt through portal applications which address their specific needs. Corporate buyers and lenders also have API-based access from the backend systems to allow for automation and scaling.

Our partners

• Corporate buyers with more than 5,000 active suppliers act as anchors. Their supply chains are attracted to use InvoiceNxt.
• On the lending side, we work with banks and alternative lenders.