Funding Societies, the unified SME digital finance platform in Southeast Asia, has entered a strategic partnership with Singapore E-Business (SGeBIZ), a digital procurement, payment and sourcing platform provider, to bring B2B embedded finance solutions to businesses in Singapore.
Following the partnership, over 2,000 Singapore-based businesses currently using the SGeBIZ procurement solution, ‘EzyProcure’ platform, will be able to receive a customised financing solution, supported and underwritten by Funding Societies, to help businesses manage their cash flow.
Launched in 2016, EzyProcure is a cloud-based platform that automates the B2B 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.
Simon Xie, Singapore country head at Funding Societies, discussed the partnership: “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.”
Since its inception in 2015, Funding Societies has disbursed over SGD5billion (approx. $3.67billion) in business financing through five million transactions, positively impacting over 100,000 SMEs across its five markets in Southeast Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Embedded finance potential
The Asia Pacific region shows the most promise of embedded finance solutions flourishing, forecasting $306billion market revenue potential – more than half that of the global market potential of $606billion.
The global B2B e-commerce market is already six times larger than that of B2C – with Asia Pacific projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 22 per cent until 2030. Payment options such as BNPL could become a key differentiating factor for a B2B buyer-merchant ecosystem, especially when 95 per cent 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 per cent of merchants offering such an option.
Edmund Louis Nathan, group CEO of SGeBIZ, added: “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.”
