It’s a sinking feeling that most small businesses know only too well. They’re performing strongly, have a solid client base and their invoices are all paid on time. But they know that this won’t be enough to get credit from the bank.

Despite being the backbone of every economy, SMEs have traditionally been badly served by the forms of finance available to them. Trying to get a loan is often a Herculean task. Long waits for bureaucratic processes to complete, the high levels of collateral required and the strict credit checks put in place by lenders all present big hurdles for SMEs to overcome when trying to get the financing they need — when they need it.

This has led to a vast and yawning funding gap for small businesses around the world.

However, the emergence of invoice financing has given companies the option to sell their invoices to improve their working capital, offering a welcome solution to this growing demand for credit. Developed over a century ago in the United States, it has become an increasingly popular way for businesses to get credit.

And with the industry growing at 10% per annum, the industry has been booming. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2009, the invoice financing industry has surged ahead at a rate of 14% per annum, adding over a trillion euros to annual invoice financing volumes in the process. In 2016, global invoice financing surpassed EUR 3 trillion in annual volume, and these trends look set to continue.

With its beauty lying in its simplicity, it is now abundantly clear that the demand for this type of financing is huge and on the rise. And this relatively new development has certainly gone some way to addressing the problems that businesses have had with getting credit and realizing their full potential.

Hive Project — a better way

However, although invoice financing certainly has been a welcome development, it has not been without its problems.

The main difficulties with traditional invoice financing is that only the biggest and most stable companies tend to get the finance they need, with access restricted for small businesses. On top of that, there are constant difficulties with automating the process, calculating ineligibles, contracts, concentrations and, of course, avoiding invoice duplication.

Which is precisely where Hive Project comes in. Each invoice is given its own unique signature, allowing invoices of much smaller values to be accepted. Hive Project, which is driven by the risk-lowering technology offered by blockchain, is now set to bring digital currency factoring and invoice financing well and truly into the mainstream, slashing costs in the process.

More about invoice financing and Hive Project in the next blog post.

More info on: https://www.hive-project.net