Atlax 360, through ARIS Risk Solutions, a company specialising in R&D&I that is part of the group, is participating in the Helix project, which is now in its third and final phase. In this third phase of the project, coordinated by onTech Innovation, an innovative financing tool called “Buy Now, Pay Later” is being created.
What is Helix 3?
Helix 3 is the third phase of a project focused on facilitating access to alternative sources of financing for SMEs in an agile, automatic and secure way. This project has focused on the research activities necessary to create a tool to offer the “Buy Now, Pay Later” (“BNPL”) mechanism.
As indicated, Helix 3 is the third phase of a global project, the first and second phases of which focused on the creation of an online platform to democratise SMEs’ access to financing and risk management tools through non-recourse invoice insurance and factoring in an individual, integrated and digitised way. These preliminary phases have been indispensable and will allow the project to be completed with the creation of BNPL.
In this way, this mechanism enables a supplier’s customers to benefit from this service by paying their invoices on the due date and securing their supply chain. Furthermore, the supplier company thus extends the terms of payment to its customer, but it does so not with its own working capital, but with that of the financing company, by means of a contract whereby one company assigns the receivables arising from its commercial activity to another, which is responsible for managing their collection.
Therefore, the BNPL system will allow companies to have fully integrated management, proactively identifying the invoices whose payment they wish to defer, and with a response and contracting of the service in real time, complying with the highest security standards.
A great contribution of value for the B2B sector
The advantages that the debtor company will find in the BNPL are:
- Administrative savings: by eliminating the administrative workload related to the management of payments to suppliers, which will be carried out by the financial company.
- Greater security and better negotiating capacity: it provides the supplier company with financial security, as it receives payment on the due date, thereby guaranteeing the supply chain to its client. The debtor company knows that its supplier will not have cash flow problems and there is an improvement in the supplier-customer commercial relationship.
- Extending payment terms to your supplier: reducing working capital financing needs and gaining liquidity.
- It does not increase your bank indebtedness in CIRBE (Central Risk Information Centre of the Bank of Spain), so your chances of obtaining financing in the future will not be reduced.
For the supplier company, the benefits will be as follows:
- Potential increase in sales: by benefiting from deferred payment, many customers will see their average purchase ticket increase.
- Administrative savings: by eliminating all the paperwork involved in the management of customer collections.
- More liquidity and punctuality in payments: guaranteeing the collection of your invoices on the due date and facilitating cash management.
- Elimination of commercial disputes and the possibility of non-payment: facilitating commercial risk management.
In short, the achievement of Helix 3 will improve SMEs’ access to financing, giving them greater capacity for growth, which will have a direct positive impact on the health of our business fabric.
This project is an initiative financed by Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo as part of the support programme for AEIs to contribute to improving the competitiveness of Spanish industry, and with the support of the European Union through the Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.
