Funding Societies, the unified SME (small and medium enterprises) digital finance platform in Southeast Asia, announced a partnership with Singapore E-Business (SGeBIZ) – a digital procurement, payment and sourcing platform provider – to bring B2B (business-to-business) embedded finance (EmFi) solutions to businesses in Singapore, that will channel Funding Societies’ digital financing capabilities via the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) feature offered within the latter’s procurement solution, EzyProcure.
The partnership will allow the over two thousand businesses, who are using the EzyProcure platform – comprising “mainly SMEs from food and beverage businesses and their suppliers using the platform – to be able to receive a customised financing solution, supported and underwritten by Funding Societies, to help these businesses manage their cash flow.”
Singapore Country Head of Funding Societies, Simon Xie, said:
“We’re honoured to partner with SGeBIZ in taking a more holistic approach in serving SMEs to aid their cash flow management needs. One such way is recognising how we are embedding our digital financing capabilities and best practices in serving Singaporean SMEs over the past nine years to support the BNPL offering via EzyProcure. This will synergise both companies’ value propositions to reach more underserved SMEs in Singapore.”
As noted in the update, the Asia Pacific region shows the most promise of EmFi solutions flourishing, “forecasting US$306 billion market revenue potential – more than half that of the global market potential of US$606 billion.”
Furthermore, the global B2B e-commerce market “is already six times larger than that of B2C (business-to-consumer) – with Asia Pacific projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% until 2030.”
Innovative payment options such as BNPL become “a key differentiating factor for an B2B buyer-merchant ecosystem, especially when 95% of B2B online buyers prefer paying on credit terms just as they would offline, but are unable to do so with only less than 10% of merchants offering such an option.”
Group CEO of SGeBIZ, Edmund Louis Nathan said:
“The partnership with Funding Societies is something I have envisioned since the inception of SGeBIZ, to be able to value-add and help our SMEs by providing much-needed liquidity to grow their businesses. It is also extremely timely, with the uncertainty in the economic conditions, rising costs associated with food costs, labour, rental and even utilities. The BNPL offering will serve as a perfect complement to our existing EzyProcure platform which has added efficiency gains to new and existing Buyers and Suppliers in our ecosystem.”
Launched in 2016, EzyProcure is a cloud-based platform “that automates the business-to-business ordering, invoice reconciliation and payment processes for food and beverage businesses with their suppliers. In doing so, businesses replace many tedious manual processes and with access to liquidity, SMEs can allocate more time for growth.”
Since its inception in 2015, Funding Societies has reportedly “disbursed over SGD5 billion (approx. SGD3.67 billion) in business financing through five million transactions, positively impacting over 100,000 SMEs across its five markets in Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.”
