Have Invoices To Liquidate? These #6 Platforms Might Help You can use your invoice as collateral where a financial institution will sanction you loan amount than your receivables

Late payment is one of the major concerns among Indian industrialists, especially in the manufacturing sector. Though the large companies can do away with it, the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are ones that are likely to suffer as their working capital is not working anymore.

In such a situation, what if you receive a lucrative deal or order. How do you fund it? One way is to apply for an SME loan from a bank, which will take about 7-15 days for approval and attract a higher rate of interest.

The other way is to use your invoice as collateral where a financial institution or a bank will sanction you an amount lower than your receivables. In other words, they will discount the bills.

With the eruption of financial technology companies, trading your receivables has become as easy as raising a loan from an e-platform. There are very few e-discounting platforms in India that you can opt for to liquidate your invoice:

RXIL

Receivables Exchange of India Ltd (RXIL) is a joint venture between Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and National Stock Exchange (NSE). It is one of the first Trade Receivables Discounting System platforms in India and went live in January this year.

According to RXIL's website, it is looking forward to acting as a catalyst to achieve the entrepreneurial growth, economic success and financial stability of SMEs

Invoice Mart

This platform is marketed by ATReDs, which is a joint venture between Axis Bank and Mi Junction. The platform connects SMEs (sellers), the corporate (the buyers) and financers, who generally bank on an e-platform.

The platform is based on the factoring option of discounting and Invoicemart claims to integrate seamlessly with its buyers' existing ERP systems, allowing them to streamline their payments to their vendors.

The platform was launched in July and has already seen invoice exchange worth INR 100 crore, according to Invoice Mart's CEO Kalyan Basu.

M1 TreDs

This TreDs platform is managed by Mynd Solution, a business process and technology management company, that offers services in finance and accounting, human resource outsourcing, information technology and consulting domain.

Unlike the above two TreDs platforms, M1 is not just into receivables factoring but also reverse factoring, which leads to higher transaction volumes flowing into the system and facilitating better pricing.

Meanwhile, SIDBI, AXIS Bank, and Mynd Solutions are the three companies that have received permission from the Reserve Bank of India to run TReDs platforms. RBI has also asked public sector banks to list themselves on TReDs. The move is an attempt by the banking regulator to sooth the pain points of SMEs.

Kredex

This e-discounting platform allows you to discount your invoices, which are raised against blue-chips corporate companies, with financial institutions like banks, NBFCs, and individual investors. The company aims to remove operational inefficiencies around the invoice discounting space by extensively using technology and its data analytics and credit underwriting capabilities

Kredex, previously called Mandii, is founded by Manish Kumar and have raised funds from Sequoia Capital and Prime Venture Partners.

Priority Vendor

This is a cloud-based platform and uses Artificial Intelligence to discount the bill. However, it is accessible only "by invitation'.

Priority Vendors have tied up with companies like Godrej Consumer Goods, Whirpool, Dabur, TVS, among others. So if you are their vendors, you have an option to discount your bills.

Flexiloans

Unlike the above platform, FlexiLoans is not a facilitator but a lender. The SMEs lending platform discounts bill through their lending product called Flexi Vendor Financing.

The company has a set of guidelines to mitigate its risk. A company should be approximately a year old with a turnover of INR 20 lakh. Additionally, the company should have booked a profit of about INR 5 lakh and a supplier of blue-chips.