East & Partners

Santander teams up with cloud supply chain platform

(14 July 2017 – Global) Santander has announced a joint offering with business networking firm Tradeshift to increase capital provided to its clients’ supply chains.

Connecting more than 1.5 million companies across 190 countries, Tradeshift says its platform enables digital connectivity in one single business network and includes capabilities such as electronic invoicing, document matching and early payment capabilities.

Santander’s global head of supply chain finance innovation Alejandro Romanos said, “Tradeshift is bringing to us better ways to reach the low-end suppliers,” he says.

“The approach and cover we have is not changing, but Tradeshift will indeed be another channel to tackle the suppliers of our clients. Through these means we should be able to target a larger number of suppliers and offer them financing, more than what we can today.

“Our ambition is to go much further than that. What Tradeshift is offering is to link our financial solutions with the digital version of the physical transactions. So through the network, we will know exactly when the order is made, when the invoice is issued, when the invoice is approved for payments, and other steps. We want to be in each of those steps and be ready to finance the suppliers of our clients in each of the transactions happening in the network. This is our final goal.”

The platform will be available to Santander’s business clients in the United Kingdom later this year, expanding to other countries in 2018.

Tradeshift’s CEO and co-founder Christian Lanng said in a statement, “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 chains to enable commerce for all. Together with Santander, we are enabling every supplier – big or small – to more easily accessible cash.”

The announcement follows a similar venture between the US firm and HSBC revealed earlier this year.