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Growing volumes, despite the increase in rates, with use of the instrument becoming increasingly systematic. Findynamic’s observatory on new supply chain finance tools, the methods for unlocking liquidity arriving from customers, highlights a clear progress in use, equal to 35%.
Whether it is invoice advance, traditional factoring, reverse factoring or the more sophisticated dynamic discount, the volumes transacted are growing even if access to these tools costs more due to the increase in rates. Interest equal to 4% in the second half of 2022, then rose by one point in the first part of last year, before reaching 5.6% in the July-December average.
«What we notice on the market – explains the founder and CEO of Findynamic Enrico Viganò – is that companies give much more weight to the certainty of transactions and the security of liquidity. In any case, these rates, compared to traditional instruments, are still reduced for an SME by at least 15%. And customers, in this phase, also contributed to calming down by lowering requests in terms of spreads”.
The days in advance required with respect to the natural due date of the invoice are on average increasing, going from 46 to 52, with interventions carried out in an increasingly systematic way by users. Observing 35 thousand transactions, we can see how 70% of companies use the tools for at least six months a year, with 43% of the sample intervening to obtain advances lasting more than nine months.
Users who on average are concentrated in the north-west (more than half of the volumes here) and who use the instrument primarily with the aim of increasing liquidity and balancing cash flows.