working capital financing

We are often asked what the benefits of factoring are. There are quite a few, but let's list the main ones here:

The economic tide appears to be turning on many fronts. Energy prices are at historic highs, interest rates, not so long negative, are rising by many percentage points and will continue to do so in the coming months. To make matters worse, the war in Ukraine is causing shortages in many areas and the uncertainty about its outcome is creating a lot of additional uncertainty in the market. Consumer confidence has never been as low as it is now. In sectors where things are still going crescendo, vacancies cannot be FILLED and wages are rising by sometimes as much as 10% or more. To the extent that we are not already in a recession, it will surely come in the near future.

Factoring has grown rapidly in popularity over the past 10 years. There are many reasons for this. On the one hand, the major banks are increasingly cautious in providing working capital financing due to stricter regulatory rules. On the other hand, this popularity also has to do with improving the product. More and more innovative parties have entered the market, making the factoring product more customer-friendly and certainly cheaper. As a result, the cost of factoring is often comparable to that of a normal business loan.

Factoring has been around for many decades, but has boomed in recent years. This is because since 2017, due to new Basel standards, general banks have become more cautious about providing short-term loans to businesses. However, there are still some misconceptions that are seen as disadvantages of this modern form of financing. In this article, we address the four most common arguments against factoring.

Spring has sprung and it seems that after more than two years, the corona crisis is largely behind us. While we are facing the negative consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there are plenty of companies that are not affected. However, we do see many uncertainties in the market affecting current financings. In this article, we discuss the alternatives and elaborate on the benefits of stacked financing.

Over the past 20 years, we see that sales via the internet have become increasingly important. In the last five years, we have seen a new development: sales via online marketplaces. In this article, we explain how this business model works and how financing works.

At the beginning of April, the government will discontinue the corona-aid package. This means entrepreneurs will have to start repaying their tax debt and face a huge financial challenge. A well-founded business plan offers a solution!

Business automation is probably not the first thing you think of when the subject of working capital finance comes up. Yet the two are indeed related. In this article, Fred Soers, managing partner of Xolv, gives his views on the developments in the market around automating working capital processes. Whereas before, way back when, communication with the banker was by letter, nowadays everything goes electronically. Not only the daily communication, which goes by e-mail or even by WhatsApp, but even the entire contract formation, increasingly goes electronically. For example, through online portals where financiers 'share' contract documents. This form of communication with the funder does not require sophisticated tools. E-mail and an internet browser usually suffice. As long as a company finances itself with loans and a standard bank credit, the banker does not place high demands on the borrower's automation.

Since the outbreak of the corona pandemic in March 2020, the world has been upside down. In the first few months, panic broke out in a big way. The general thought was that the economy would grind to a halt, there would be mass layoffs and bankruptcies would rise to record levels. This turned out to be far better than expected. However, congestion arose in the global chains as demand first fell away, but picked up again not much later. In this article, you will read our view on these developments and how you can have sufficient working capital to maximise your company's growth.

The Netherlands has traditionally been a country of traders. Nowadays, a large proportion of SMEs are involved in trading. This means that in many cases they do not produce themselves, or at least have a significant part of their product produced elsewhere. These companies buy in products after they have received orders, but sometimes even before that, so they deliberately take some inventory risk. Credit insurance can play an important role in preventing business from grinding to a halt. In this article, we explain how credit insurance speeds up trade and makes financing easier.