eBiashara: Building a Trading Community Between Buyers, Banks and Suppliers

Baiju Shah, Director of eBiashara, presents the company: a supply chain finance platform whose goal is to build a trading community between buyers, banks and suppliers.

“eBiashara is a supply chain finance platform. We are an innovation partner of Kenya Commercial Bank and we work with companies such as the big supermarket chains here, allowing them to provide early payments to their suppliers. What do we mean by ‘early payments’? This means enabling suppliers of Kenya‘s large supermarket chains to be paid early, on the date they deliver, at a discount rate. It is all about invoice discounting, but this is turned on its head and we call it reverse factoring or supplier finance. But the risk falls on the buyer, rather than the supplier. In the traditional model, you would take your invoices to your supplier, who would take them to the bank, and the bank would then discount them. In our scenario, we build a trading community between the buyer, the bank and the supplier. Once this is in place, we have an impact on the market in general, and we are trying to change the way that different companies trade in this market”, says Ronal Samani.