- Supply chain finance is a simple effective funding tool that should be in every finance directors ‘tool kit’. It can take a number of different forms, and we will work with you to find the one that best suits your needs.
Ensure a productive relationship with existing suppliers, and approach new ones with confidence and negotiating power.
You decide how much to repay and when, using our flexible terms to offer your business maximum agility.
With over £500m of payments transacted, our proven technology platform allows your finance team full visibility and control over your invoices.
Critical to the success of any supplier early payment process is ensuring the ‘procure to pay’ processes remain efficient. Our approach is to “start simple” and our invoice upload process enables you to submit invoices from day one, without IT integration costs.
Where necessary, approved suppliers gain full visibility of their invoice status choosing which invoices are paid early and when, and Woodsford TradeBridge take care of the system administration and setup for all supplier and buyer users.
Woodsford TradeBridge SCF is particularly suited to companies with a turnover of between £25 – 500M. Whilst most of our clients have a healthy balance sheet, we do also offer programmes to good companies either midway through a turnaround or who are in a ‘pre-profit’ growth phase. We fund smaller companies and some start-up companies via our trade finance products.
Yes, although we may request guarantees from parent companies where appropriate. We also use credit insurance to cover at least a portion of our risk via a panel of insurers.
TradeBridge are funded by a mixture of family office investment and senior bank lending from a large European bank. This gives us both the flexibility to be truly innovative and well as offering competitive rates. For example, we are able to actively fund good companies in sectors where banks have retreated.
Woodsford have a 30 year track record of successful investment in both the finance and real estate development / construction sectors.
Sitting as an unsecured creditor, the Tradebridge facility has been explictly designed not to conflict with existing secured banking products. Pretty much all of our clients have existing debt facilities with high street banks and our agreements have been approved by the main banks a number of times already.
Negotiating on payments terms is an art that has been forgotten in many organisations and our clients are often surprised at the kind of discounts available for early payment, even from very large suppliers. We find that one key factor is for the finance department to set strict payment terms for supplier payments and use SCF to handle the exceptions. Good for your process costs, balance sheet and bottom line!
We don’t have any restrictions on which sectors we can fund (with-in reason!) although our current client base tends to be mostly in the construction, manufatcuring, energy services and retail / wholesale.
Reverse factoring is a supply chain product created by the banks for their investment grade (i.e. FTSE100) companies. The simple idea is to dramatically push out payment terms for the largest suppliers. The reality is much more complex and not really suited for the mid market clients we serve. That is why we designed a much simpler legal and operational framework that is not reverse factoring!
We have a number of clients who co-fund their programmes when they have excess cash available and we would be happy to discuss this option with you.
See our blog post (FAQ’s for your suppliers) link for more.
To find out how a Woodsford TradeBridge supply chain finance programme could make your business more agile and improve your liquidity, 
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