Italian Invoice Finance Platform Partners With SACE

The online invoice finance sector is heating up in Italy.

SACE – an established provider of a broad range of financial and insurance products – has entered into a partnership with Workinvoice. Specifically, SACE’s services include export credit, credit assurance, foreign investment protection services, financial guarantees, sureties and factoring. The tie-up appears to have taken the form of a broad collaboration. We suspect that cross-selling and referrals schemes will materialise between the two entities in the not too distant future. SACE has worked with over 25,000 business customers from over 189 different countries over the past 30 years, and has closed €70 billion of insured projects.

SACE is owned by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti – which is in turn 80.1% owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. Alessandra Ricci, Chief Business Officer at SACE, explained the nature of the partnership:

“With this agreement, SACE is confirming their commitment to promote the opening of the Italian market to the “alternative” sources of financing that are steadily gaining ground abroad. The partnership with Workinvoice is the first in a series of 2.0 initiatives for offering SMEs innovative solutions to sustain their liquidity."

Workinvoice launched in January 2015. The platform has from the outset outsourced certain core functions. Credit assessment duties have been attributed to modeFinance. Settlement services are to be offered by a primary international bank – the name of which has not been disclosed.

Only yesterday did we cover MarketInvoice’s newly forged relationship with KPMG – which is the latest in a series of similar strategic partnerships struck by the UK market leader.

Workinvoice shares many of the same features at MarketInvoice, including a non-retail investor base. Now it appears that the platform is also following the MarketInvoice blueprint for driving up deal flow: join forces with an established SME service provider.

Matteo Tarroni, co-founder of Workinvoice, commented on the SACE partnership:

”We at Workinvoice are enthusiastic over this agreement which demonstrates that innovation is possible even in the most 'traditional' sectors. Our objective, shared with SACE, is to provide SMEs a simple, flexible instrument for narrowing the credit gap that has made working capital management more complicated, by channeling resources interested in investing in the real economy toward the production system."