Nipendo, the provider of a cloud-based P2P-focused platform and Integrate Financial, a new, non-bank finance and technology company announced a partnership to provide supply chain finance solutions to trading partners that leverage Nipendo’s platform. Ardent Partners was briefed on the announcement by Nipendo’s VP of Marketing, Eran Livneh and Integrate Financial’s CEO, Zalman Vitenson, and another Integrate executive, Mark Demos.
In the next few months, the partners plan to introduce a financing mechanism for US and Canadian suppliers on the Nipendo platform to gain early payment on their invoices. Integrate Financial’s CEO Zalman Vitenson says that his firm will focus its underwriting on the transactional data available within the Nipendo platform instead of on traditional third-party credit ratings which he believes will enable his company to offer faster and more efficiently-priced financing to suppliers. Later in the year, the companies plan to link Integrate Financial’s financing to Nipendo’s dynamic discounting solution so that buyers can leverage third-party capital to pay suppliers early and share in the discount benefit.
At some level, the ePayables marketplace (covered on the pages of Payables Place) was able to develop because of the void created by the lack of an ERP-based solution that could properly manage invoice automation. Technology companies developed eInvoicing, P2P, and scan and capture solutions because their back-end financial systems could not reasonably automate the accounts payable function and the ERP companies did not invest in developing solutions that could. We believe that we are on now the cusp of the emergence of a new market for supply chain finance (SCF) – this time, however, it is the failure of banks to develop adequate financing solutions to serve their merchant customers and their suppliers that is allowing this new industry to develop and grow. To be fair, the significant visibility gap that has existed around invoicing for both buyers and suppliers has made it difficult for banks or any financier to significantly enter the SCF space. Nipendo, with its network of trading partners that are enabled with visibility and efficient invoice processing capabilities, is exactly the type of technology platform that we believe will help enable significant growth in the SCF space over the next few years.
With more than 20,000 suppliers on its platform and a solid customer list that includes several multinational companies (after only three years in operation), Nipendo finds itself squarely in one of the industry’s hottest supply management market segments and is primed for growth. With the other network providers aggressively expanding core offerings and developing third-party partnerships, we expect to see more announcements from Nipendo in the months ahead. We’ll be watching and reporting….
