by Matteo Tarroni | CEO and Co-Founder of Workinvoice
In addition to the liquidity emergency, smart working and digitalisation, Covid-19 has accelerated theefficiency of supply chain finance. He discussed this PwC in an update to the third edition of its Fintech 2020 report in Italy, which tracks the health of 364 companies (of which 278 FinTech and 86 TechFin, players of interest in the area of Tech Enablers and Cybersecurity). PwC cites as an example of an enabler of new tools to unlock the payment chain Workinvoice, a fintech company operating since 2015, which brings financial resources and the production sector into direct contact. It is precisely the payment chain, which has always held back the business system, that risks becoming an unsustainable ballast at this point in history. Workinvoice has developed Italy's first online marketplace for invoice trading, the alternative channel for advancing invoices, and in 2018 formed an industrial partnership with Cribis (Crif group). The company is at the centre of an ecosystem of financial operators, management software companies and supply chain solutions infrastructure.
How is the real economy?
The lockdown has had an unprecedented impact on manufacturing activities, creating a widespread emergency that has put more than 120,000 companies at risk. Workinvoice itself has estimated (in the joint Observatory with Cribis) estimated a financial requirement of €45billion for SMEs, which to date have submitted 1.1 million applications to banks for €87 billion in state-guaranteed loans.
The lockdown has driven digital services, both e-commerce (which has gained 2 million more consumers) and banking: during the pandemic, 51% of Italians have used online banking more, 54% have increased their use of banking services via mobile, 27% plan to reduce or cease frequenting physical counters after the emergency. In general, PwC reports data from FinTechs mapped by ItaliaFintech, which in the first five months of 2020 have increased their financing to SMEs by 4.5 times compared to the same period in 2019, financing three times as many companies. Of relevance here is the growth in the importance of Supply Chain Finance, "i.e. theset of solutions that allow a company to finance its working capital in the supply chains of which it is a part", writes PwC.
The great adaptability of fintechs
The flexibility of fintechs allows them to adapt to the context quickly and develop the most suitable solutions to the contingent problems of businesses. The ability of Italian FinTech companies to adapt to an uncertain market environment is attributed by PwC to their qualities of "speed, specialisation, digitalisation, flexibility and user experience, which in this phase represent an important value even for traditional financial companies or even large industrial companies". Workinvoice, for example, together with Crif and with the support of PwC, has created a marketplace for the exchange of tax credits from the Ecobonus and Sismabonus 110% introduced with the Decreto Rilancio. In the marketplace it will be possible, for the first time, to sell and purchase, as tax credits, the tax deductions provided by the legislation. In this way we will facilitate the transformation of the credit into liquidity at market prices, accelerating the spread of the use of incentives and, ultimately, supporting the construction sector. But the nature of the markeplace allows us to adapt it to other types and sectors in the future.
