Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and Pythéas Capital Advisors want to reduce payment delays

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has strengthened its relationship with FinTech Pytheas Capital Advisors, in which it expressed an interest in 2019. Today, their joint work focuses on the launch of Arkéa Extend, a new financing solution for corporate clients. It aims to reduce payment delays in a context of half-heartedness in the invoicing and business financing market. It also wants to prepare companies for the obligation to dematerialise invoices as of 2024.

FACTS

• Arkéa Extend is a new solution for financing supplier or subcontractor invoices, accessible via the TRESO2 digital platform. TRESO2 already allows Arkéa Banque Entreprises et Institutionnels' customers to pay their suppliers in advance, before the contractual due date of the invoice, thanks to a dedicated cash credit.

• Arkea Extend will extend this functionality by allowing corporate clients to pay their supplier or subcontractor invoices on time or deferred.

• In concrete terms, this is a collaborative reverse factoring solution. Suppliers can choose the invoices on which they wish to receive early payment; the financial conditions are therefore more attractive, as Arkéa has already assessed the risk with the ordering company, unlike traditional factoring solutions.

• Arkea Extend will also be distributed by the subsidiary Arkéa Banque Entreprises et Institutionnels.

CHALLENGES

• Ease the financial management of companies: Arkéa Extend's raison d'être is to enable companies to finance their working capital requirements. It also allows them to improve their relationship with their subcontractors by offering them advantageous payment terms thanks to Arkéa's solution. Pythéas Capital Advisors hopes to obtain certification for its platform in the context of the new regulation on the obligation to dematerialise invoices from 2024. Arkea Extend also aims to be an optimised tool for managing electronic invoicing.

• Consolidate its investments: The announcement of the launch of Arkea Extend follows a new investment, made at the beginning of September, by the mutual bank in FinTech Pythéas Capital Advisors. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and Bpifrance granted it €5 million in a fundraising round. The announced objective was to develop TRESO2's service offering, organised into three modules: supplier compliance, invoice processing, payment and financing.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Although the need for cash advances and factoring is still significant in France today, the Banque de France revealed, following a survey of more than one million companies (approximately 600,000 VSEs and 100,000 SMEs, excluding VSEs), that the pandemic had not aggravated the overall fragility of companies. Over the first ten months of 2021, the net debt outstanding of companies remained stable at close to EUR 1,000 billion, after a slight increase of EUR 6 billion between December 2019 and December 2020. Between the end of 2019 and September 2021, the share of companies whose deposits exceed their loans even increased from 39% to 43% for VSEs and from 52% to 54% for SMEs.

• Still according to the Banque de France, the health crisis would have been an aggravating factor for only 6% of companies by mid-2021. But the new risks linked in particular to inflation pose a new threat to company finances. Their needs in terms of factoring and cash management assistance therefore remain very important, particularly when it comes to shortening their payment deadlines.

• It is also worth noting that a factoring pioneer, Finexkap, has just announced that it is going into receivership, following the decline in the value of fintechs, which has deprived it of access to capital