Funding Societies, the Singapore-based unified small and medium enterprises (SME) digital finance platform, has announced a strategic partnership with Singapore E-Business (SGeBIZ), a digital procurement, payment and sourcing platform provider, to bring business to business (B2B) embedded finance (EmFi) solutions to businesses in Singapore.

Funding Societies said in a statement on Wednesday that the EmFi solutions will channel Funding Societies’ digital financing capabilities via the “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) feature offered within the latter’s procurement solution, EzyProcure.

According to the statement, the partnership will allow the over two thousand businesses, who are using the EzyProcure platform – comprising mainly SMEs from food and beverage businesses and their suppliers using the platform – to be able to receive a customized financing solution, supported and underwritten by Funding Societies, to help these businesses manage their cash flow.

“We’re honoured to partner with SGeBIZ in taking a more holistic approach in serving SMEs to aid their cash flow management needs,” said Simon Xie, Singapore Country Head of Funding Societies.

According to him, one such way is recognizing how they are embedding their digital financing capabilities and best practices in serving Singaporean SMEs over the past nine years to support the BNPL offering via EzyProcure.

“This will synergize both companies’ value propositions to reach more underserved SMEs in Singapore,” he added.

According to the statement, the Asia Pacific region shows the most promise of EmFi solutions flourishing, forecasting $306 billion market revenue potential – more than half that of the global market potential of $606 billion.

Furthermore, the global B2B e-commerce market is already six times larger than that of business-to-consumer (B2C) – with Asia Pacific projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent until 2030.

Innovative payment options such as BNPL become a key differentiating factor for an B2B buyer-merchant ecosystem, especially when 95 percent of B2B online buyers prefer paying on credit terms just as they would offline, but are unable to do so with only less than 10 percent of merchants offering such an option.

“The partnership with Funding Societies is something I have envisioned since the inception of SGeBIZ, to be able to value-add and help our SMEs by providing much-needed liquidity to grow their businesses,” said Edmund Louis Nathan, Group Chief Executive Officer of SGeBIZ.

“It is also extremely timely, with the uncertainty in the economic conditions, rising costs associated with food costs, labor, rental and even utilities,

“The BNPL offering will serve as a perfect complement to our existing EzyProcure platform which has added efficiency gains to new and existing Buyers and Suppliers in our ecosystem,” he added.

Launched in 2016, EzyProcure is a cloud-based platform that automates the business-to-business ordering, invoice reconciliation and payment processes for food and beverage businesses with their suppliers.

In doing so, businesses replace many tedious manual processes and with access to liquidity, so SMEs can allocate more time for growth.

Funding Societies is the largest unified SME digital finance platform in Southeast Asia.

The FinTech company provides $1 billion annually of business financing to SMEs.

Since its inception in 2015, the firm has disbursed over SGD 5 billion ($3.68 billion) in business financing through five million transactions, positively impacting over 100,000 SMEs across its five markets in Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

In recent years, the firm has made strategic milestones including its acquisition of regional digital payments platform CardUp and co-investment into Bank Index in Indonesia.

The firm is backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, CGC Digital, SBVA, Peak XV Partners , Alpha JWC Ventures, SMBC Bank, BRI Ventures, VNG Corporation, Rapyd Ventures, Endeavor, EBDI, SGInnovate, Qualgro, and Golden Gate Ventures among others.

SGeBIZ is a Fintech Enabler for SMEs in South East Asia and a procure-to-pay platform in Singapore.

The firm provides digital solutions from procurement, invoicing, payment and collection to over 3,000 businesses in Singapore and Malaysia.

Khazanah and CGC Digital invest in Funding Societies to broaden financing access to MSMEs