Lex Greensill says public servants could benefit from his supply-chain financing scheme, but others warn it already poses risks in the commercial world

Wages upfront: the financier who wants to change how Australians are paid

The Bundaberg sugarcane farmer turned billionaire financier Lex Greensill wants to get inside your wallet.

Greensill, who heads a global financial empire of the same name, has already enmeshed himself in the corporate world by offering a controversial product, supply-chain financing, which allows suppliers to big business to be paid earlier – for a fee.

Now he says he wants to extend the idea to employees, who would get early access to their pay from Greensill through an app that acts “as an ATM”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lex Greensill, of Greensill Capital. Photograph: Matthew Josep/Matthew Joseph

At a meeting last month he told Scott Morrison the system could be applied to the 150,000 employees of the commonwealth public service.

But critics of supply-chain financing have warned that it can encourage businesses to push out the terms they offer their suppliers, effectively using them as a source of finance.

How does supply-chain financing work?

In its supply-chain financing business, Greensill Capital strikes deals with big companies under which it offers their suppliers early payment terms on their invoices.

This means that instead of getting paid in 30 or 60 days – or longer, as is a consistent complaint made by small businesses when dealing with big ones – a supplier can get paid immediately.

In Australia, Telstra and the contractor CIMIC, formerly known as Leighton Holdings, are known to be using Greensill Capital.

Effectively Greensill is offering suppliers a loan, and charging them interest at rates that depend on the level of risk that it won’t be able to collect from the corporate client.

Market sources say those rates can be as much as 8% a year, in the case of the Whyalla steel mill, which owner Gupta has previously told the Guardian has “fundamental problems”.

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But Greensill said the average rate was much lower.

“The average here in Australia for our customers, it’s between 1% and 2% per annum, and there are no other fees,” he said.

What concerns have been raised?

The small business ombudsman, Kate Carnell, is investigating concerns about supply-chain financing, also known as reverse factoring, and the ratings agency Moody’s is worried about the risk it might pose to the financial strength of companies.

According to Moody’s, big companies can benefit by extending the formal notice period for payments, thus putting pressure on suppliers to deal with supply-chain financers – a possibility that worries Carnell and Labor’s employment spokesman, Brendan O’Connor.

Launching her inquiry on 30 October, the same day Greensill met the PM, Carnell said she would “investigate whether supply-chain finance is being used by big business as a means to stretch out formal payment terms and as a strategy to manipulate the reporting of working capital and cash reserves”.

Labor’s O’Connor is blunter, accusing the government of allowing big business to use their suppliers as “piggy banks”. He said he was “concerned about contrived ‘reverse factoring’ arrangements used by large businesses to obscure unreasonable extended payment times to small businesses”.

“Small businesses require prompt payments to help manage cash flow and to grow, particularly when access to finance is tight, and yet small business minister Michaelia Cash has to date been silent on the issue of reverse factoring,” he said.

Greensill stressed there was no obligation on suppliers to work with his company.

“It’s really important to say it’s completely optional,” Greensill said. “I think the point Kate is making more generally is an encouragement for corporations to think carefully about having payment terms with smaller suppliers that are at or faster than 30 days.”

But he acknowledged the fee his company charges a supplier was sometimes shared with the big business it is billing.

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“In the case of the majority of the customers, we do not share the rate that we charge their suppliers back to them,” he said. “Most companies in Australia are focused on us delivering the cheapest possible credit to their suppliers.”

Moody’s has also warned that the rise of reverse-factoring firms has been implicated in giant company failures overseas. In a note sent to clients in September, it said reverse factoring was “developing an unenviable reputation for making bad situations worse”.

Moody’s said its use contributed to the collapse of the UK government contractor Carillion, which failed early last year owing about £1bn, and Abengoa, a Spanish renewable energy company that imploded in late 2015 owing banks €20.2bn. It said disclosure of the use of reverse factoring was “very poor and risks may not be understood”.

“There was no disclosure in the accounts of Carillion plc before its collapse” of the use of reverse factoring, Moody’s said. It said “altruistic messaging” depicted reverse financing as a way big companies could meet government directives to pay suppliers in a timely way – a topic about which the Morrison government has also raised concerns.

“In some cases flagged to us by suppliers, the customer appears to be pressuring suppliers to channel invoices through the RF program as a condition of contract when bidding for new work,” Moody’s said.

How could this work with public sector employees?

Unlike advances he offers to corporate suppliers – and also unlike a payday loan – Greensill proposes that it would be the employer, not the employee, who would pay a fee to his company for the credit. For employees, the fee would be nothing – “ever” – he said.

Both Greensill and a spokeswoman for the prime minister declined to discuss their meeting, which they said was private. However, Greensill was happy to talk about the company’s push into the consumer world more generally.

“In the United Kingdom, and we’ve announced it publicly, we’ve launched a product that we think will have pretty profound impact economically, around enabling employees to get paid every day and to do so at no cost,” Greensill said.

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“I meet with a number of world leaders – the British government is one of our biggest customers. We think that the tools that we deliver have an important effect in delivering low-cost capital to businesses, and hopefully in the future to employees.”

He said it was anachronistic that most employees were paid fortnightly or monthly. “With our technology … we’re actually able to see employees’ entitlement to wages as they accrue every day, as they do their day’s work, and use that information through an app that the employee can access.

“They can see what they’re owed by their employer and request that cash, and that’s paid immediately into their bank account on a real-time basis.”

Greensill’s own finances

Questions have also been raised in the market about the financial strength of Greensill’s corporate empire, Greensill Capital, and its relationships with troubled Swiss fund manager GAM and the high-flying steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta.

Greensill defended the burgeoning business and its flagship product. The company’s ability to navigate a sudden reduction in the size of a key fund run for it by GAM, from about US$2.7bn to a current size of about US$250m, showed it did not deal in “esoteric assets that are going to cause another financial crisis”, he said.

He declined to comment on how much funding Greensill Capital had organised for Gupta – or any other client – but said no single client accounted for more than 10% of the group’s business.

Meanwhile, the assets held by another fund bearing the Greensill name run by GAM, the GAM Greensill Supply Chain Fund, this year plunged from US$2.7bn to US$250m after another Greensill customer, Vodafone, redeemed its holdings to pay for a takeover bid.

“That reduction was achieved without any loss to investors,” Greensill said. This was because invoices held by the fund were due in a short period of time – “so they just turn into cash quickly” – and GAM sold them at a profit to “the vast pool of other investors we have”, he said.

Critics have also raised questions about the state of Greensill Capital’s own accounts.

While it declared a profit of US$49.4m last year, up from US$20.8m in 2017, some observers struggle to understand how the sausage is made.

Greensill himself seemed stumped when the Guardian asked how a US$9m negative operating cash flow – money spent to run the business – at its UK company translated into revenue declared by the same entity of more than US$233m.

There was a pause.

“I honestly don’t know what the answer to that is,” he said.

The company’s finance team later provided a detailed answer, bridging the gap between the two numbers.

Greensill has his eyes on bigger issues, attacking the banks for their dominant role in the Australian economy, which he said made up more than 29% of the local stock exchange.

“Those organisations are supposed to be plumbing, and plumbing shouldn’t be 29% of a proxy for the value of our economy,” he said. “I think the reason that Greensill has grown in the manner that it has is because we have said that banks aren’t the answer, or the sole answer, to financing the real economy.”











