Funding Societies, Southeast Asia's leading unified digital finance platform for SMEs, has unveiled a strategic collaboration with Singapore E-Business (SGeBIZ), a provider of digital procurement, payment, and sourcing solutions. Together, they aim to introduce innovative B2B embedded finance (EmFi) solutions to businesses in Singapore. This partnership will leverage Funding Societies' expertise in digital financing, integrating it into SGeBIZ's procurement solution, EzyProcure, particularly through the 'Buy Now, Pay Later' (BNPL) feature.
This collaboration will enable more than two thousand businesses currently utilizing the EzyProcure platform, primarily SMEs in the food and beverage sector along with their suppliers, to access tailored financing solutions. These solutions, backed and underwritten by Funding Societies, aim to assist these businesses in effectively managing their cash flow.
Singapore Country Head of Funding Societies, Simon Xie, said, "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 recognizing how we have embedded 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 synergize both companies' value propositions to reach more underserved SMEs in Singapore".
The Asia Pacific region holds significant promise for the flourishing of EmFi solutions, with a forecasted market revenue potential of US$306 billion, surpassing half of the global market potential of US$606 billion. Moreover, the global B2B e-commerce market already exceeds that of B2C by sixfold, with the Asia Pacific region expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% until 2030. Innovative payment alternatives like BNPL emerge as crucial differentiators within the B2B buyer-merchant ecosystem, particularly considering that 95% of B2B online buyers prefer credit-based payment terms, yet less than 10% of merchants currently offer such options.
Group CEO of SGeBIZ, Edmund Louis Nathan said, "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".
Introduced in 2016, EzyProcure is a cloud-based platform designed to streamline business-to-business ordering, invoice reconciliation, and payment procedures for food and beverage enterprises and their suppliers. By leveraging this platform, businesses eliminate numerous laborious manual tasks, allowing SMEs to free up valuable time for expansion while also gaining access to liquidity.