Kenya Financial Services: Discover eBiashara’s Supply Chain Finance Platform

Interview with Baiju Shah, Director of eBiashara

Could you give us an overview of eBiashara?

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.

And how long have you been on the market for?

With this product, we are currently in a proof of concept phase with Nakumatt. We are trialling with KCB and Nakumatt, and we hope to be fully launched by the end of the year.

In addition to this product, are there any other services that you offer?

Yes. Together with the eBiashara product, the other services that we offer are onboarding services, marketing services, project management services, and anything around technology.

We are currently expanding the project to include supply chain collaboration, which is taking it a step further downstream in the market. This involves creating an electronic invoicing platform where most large corporations will be able to receive invoices from their suppliers 100% electronically. This is the next phase for eBiashara.

What would be your message to our international audience considering Kenya as a business and investment destination?

I arrived here 4 years ago. I considered Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra and Nairobi, where I ended up putting both my feet, because it offers all the key services, together with the available skills set, whereas more training is required everywhere else in Africa. The weather is also fantastic here and business cycles are also very good indeed. Moreover, it provides you with the opportunity to explore and be part of an ecosystem which is known for its innovation. If you form a part of this ecosystem, you have better chances of being innovative in comparison to other African cities, in principle. This is home for me now.