Bank/fintech collaboration: how Societe Generale Factoring places client needs at the heart of its strategy
With the emergence of fintechs, debt financing and Supply Chain Finance have experienced a new dynamic in recent years. And this is just the beginning: more and more partnerships are being developed between banks and new technology companies to digitalise this type of financing and provide clients with the best of both worlds.
By entering the market with new technological solutions, fintechs have undoubtedly helped to boost the working capital and debt financing market. The result is greater simplicity, flexibility and efficiency for clients. But these new entrants must also rely on large established banking groups, whose value proposition is complementary: this is the whole reason for the recent collaborations that Societe Generale Factoring has developed with the fintech CRX Markets.
CRX Markets, is a German fintech specialising in Supply Chain Finance and Receivables Financing, which saw Societe Generale Factoring as a key partner in developing its solution in the French market, and more broadly in Europe. CRX Markets aims to constantly expand the number of its key partners able to finance working capital, to make its services as attractive as possible. Societe Generale’s strong positioning in the large corporate segment in Western Europe has made this partnership very relevant.
Alexei Zabudkin, CFO of CRX Markets sums up this complementarity well:
“We are very happy to welcome Societe Generale Factoring as a financing partner to the CRX Marketplace. A key bank to a number of our existing and prospective clients in Europe with a strong advisory angle, Societe Generale can play a significant role in enhancing the working capital management of our joint clients. The bank’s focus on its core strengths and its willingness to onboard best-in-class fintech partners serve as another confirmation of the validity of a bank-fintech collaboration.”
A common goal, together, to remove barriers to entry for clients
Until now, many companies were held back by a lack of internal resources to deploy Supply Chain Finance programs for their suppliers. These require establishing connections between banks’ information systems and clients’ accounting tools, while ensuring compliance and security rules are respected. This is where the fintechs, who play a facilitating role, come in.
Establishing connectivity with a fintech such as CRX Markets allows us to support, in the best conditions, the very large clients in the growth of their programs.
The complementarity and synergy of expertise are obvious: for fintechs, the development of technological solutions (including connectivity with ERP systems); for Societe Generale Factoring, the financial expertise, financing and robust and industrialised processes to execute a large volume of payments.
This expertise-based collaboration is the way to serve clients more effectively.
Thanks to this partnership, Societe Generale Factoring was able to integrate new Supply Chain Finance programs in Germany, but also to respond jointly with CRX Markets to requests for proposal for large European companies.
The client is at the heart of the system, he benefits from flexible, efficient, and optimised solutions to meet his financing needs. Clients also benefit from optimised costs and time to delivery, since the technical, legal and IT aspects are carried out as early as possible by the bank and its partners to facilitate the “industrialisation” of working capital and receivables financing.
By jointly removing barriers to entry - and even pooling our commercial efforts where relevant - we are convinced that this type of bank/fintech partnership can contribute to the development of the receivables finance and supply chain finance market, as well as to the democratisation of this type of financing.
