Santander has announced a global partnership with Tradeshift, the largest business commerce platform in the world, to deliver the next generation of end-to-end digitally enabled working capital solution, the first of which will be supply chain finance (SCF).
Santander will offer integrated and seamless trade-related financing solutions in an open marketplace connected to over 1.5 million businesses and their enterprise trading partners. With tens of billions of dollars transacted monthly across the Tradeshift platform, layering a trade financing capability will enable an unprecedented adoption opportunity to unlock frozen liquidity.
This joint offering extends the speed and simplicity of the purchase to pay process for clients by seamlessly linking e-invoicing to SCF provided by Santander. The Tradeshift platform enables digital connectivity in a single business network, which will include access to a flexible and competitive source of working capital solutions to suppliers. The partnership will allow Santander to develop better, more tailored products and services to finance the transactions occurring in the network.
This joint offering will enhance the traditional SCF solutions through more efficient, digital supplier on-boarding processes, faster authentication of trading parties, process automation and integration with large enterprise resourcing planning systems, and timely, on-line access to financing options.
Santander and Tradeshift plan to make the solution available, initially to UK clients, in late 2017. Tradeshift is a portfolio company of Santander Innoventures, the $200 million FinTech venture capital arm of Banco Santander.
Christian Lanng, CEO & Co-founder of Tradeshift said: “We’re excited to partner with Santander to co-develop joint financial-services propositions for trading partners. This initiative aims to reduce structural barriers for provisioning liquidity across entire supply chain to enable commerce for all. Together with Santander, we are enabling every supplier — big or small — to more easily access cash. Tradeshift has 1.5 million suppliers worldwide. The benefit to them will be real.”
José Luis Calderón, Global Head of Santander Global Transaction Banking, commented: “We are happy to co-innovate with such a versatile partner as Tradeshift. Our joint efforts bring greater speed, simplicity, full digitization, savings and greater efficiency to a whole package of financial services propositions. We’re helping large corporations and their suppliers.”
