10 Comments
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Azher Rashid Hussain's avatar

Brilliant Read as always Marc

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Sai Pramodh's avatar

I am going to be a regular on your substack now marc. This was a brilliant read.

One question, how do you keep track of all the financial related news across the world? Is there a go-to place for you to read or a list of websites you keep track of?

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Marc Rubinstein's avatar

Thanks Sai. No short-cuts I'm afraid, just ear to the ground!

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Nordic investor's avatar

Brilliant read. Great insights.

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Dennis Le's avatar

Thanks Marc for the this brilliant piece.

Would you say Greensill is just one single bad example out there but SCF in itself is value adding to SMEs which otherwise dont have many alternatives out there. I still see SCF as very helpful. In China, the concept is even developed further with multi-tier financing which has been super-charging the domestic supply chain development

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Marc Rubinstein's avatar

Thanks, Dennis. Article's principally about Greensill; haven't looked at other SCF players sufficiently to comment.

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Val's avatar

To me, the reverse factoring (supply finance), as described above, is a scheme to further squeeze a couple of percentages from one's suppliers.

Convincing Vodafone to be an investor is pretty shrewd: it's an easy way to originate business by incentivizing Vodafone to "offer" reverse factoring to its supplier base as well as mitigate the main risk, i.e. discounting invoices that are frauds or with strings attached (warranties etc). If Vodafone is an investor, it will only offer to the securitization pool invoices it has a clear intention to pay on time.

I bet the suppliers are mostly small businesses thrilled to have a big name client.

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Marc Rubinstein's avatar

Unfortunately many suppliers are small businesses, with their own working capital constraints, who are not given much choice.

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anil's avatar

Super.... I love your blog.. I have already recommended it to all my friends....

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Marc Rubinstein's avatar

Thanks Anil 🙏

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