As 2022 gets underway, Orbian chair Thomas Dunn reflects on the milestones that the SCF provider has achieved over 2021 and lays out its objectives for the New Year.
The year 2021 started with the uncertainties brought by 2020 and the hope that things would get better. The Orbian community has remained strong throughout and we have enjoyed long overdue non-virtual interactions with our teams, clients and partners. On the business side, there been some important strategic developments that have helped us better serve our clients and continue to be the best in the industry.
Using data to develop innovation
Data is now the lifeblood of many firms, particularly in the modern economy. Over the past 20 years of serving our clients in the SCF market, we have developed a unique and rich dataset about the behaviours that exist between buyers and suppliers which we leverage to enhance our products and services. One significant development from the past year, that accounts for about 20 per cent of our business, is our fixed rate offering. This empowers suppliers with the choice to lock in the rate they pay on the discounts received for a defined period. This gives far more certainty versus a program priced based on Libor or other floating rate metrics which is the way that SCF programs are generally arranged. Orbian’s unique offering has crucial implications for the sophistication with which the buyers and suppliers can now negotiate the broadest collaborative benefits of their SCF program.
SCF’s role in the green transition
It is our role to provide a suite of services that allow buyers and their suppliers to collaborate in order to best meet their goals. These goals increasingly involve ESG considerations at their core. We were proud to release Orbian’s first ESG Report in March 2021, following a major ESG research initiative we launched in November 2020. It included a review of the current status of the ESG agenda of over 6,000 suppliers using the Orbian solutions, located in over 60 countries and operating in 22 different industries. The report also included an overview of some of the mechanisms by which we believe SCF as an industry can assist in furthering the ESG agenda for our clients.
SCF providers have a decisive role to play in the green transition, and we believe Orbian can do this in a way that does not require a trade off between working capital requirements and the ESG agenda. This reflects to a broader principle we have at Orbian which is serving the needs of large scale organisations and their supply chains with humility. We aim to work with clients to create mutually beneficial goals without being accused of “going green by being mean”.
Going forward by focusing on our key differentiator
We have the critical mission of facilitating transactions between some of the largest companies in the world and their suppliers. This is not a responsibility that we take lightly. Our sole focus is on SCF. The experience of our management team, our staff retention rate and the stability of our ownership, all help us to achieve this mission. We are the stewards of the relationship that we have with our customers: buyers, their suppliers and the many sources of program funding. Always and everywhere, our first priority is to serve our existing clients. It is then as our second responsibility to offer our services to others. That is a very sharp point of differentiation from other providers in our industry and this service focus is inculcated as a core value across the whole organisation at Orbian.
As we look to 2022, let us keep that service priority at the front of everything that we strive to achieve. We are privileged to work with a large, and ever-increasing, number of the world’s largest and most demanding corporations. We should be intensely proud of the trust that they show in us every day: a trust that is based on their recognition of the culture of service excellence that underpins Orbian today and into the future.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn
Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash
