Funding Societies, a digital finance platform for small and medium enterprises in Southeast Asia, announced a strategic partnership with Singapore E-Business (SGeBIZ), a digital procurement, payment and sourcing platform provider, to offer B2B embedded finance (EmFi) solutions to businesses in Singapore.

The partnership will channel Funding Societies’ digital financing capabilities via the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) feature offered within SGeBIZ’s procurement solution EzyProcure. This will allow over 2,000 businesses that are now using the EzyProcure platform – mainly SMEs from food and beverage sector and their suppliers – to be able to receive a customized financing solution, supported and underwritten by Funding Societies, to help them manage their cash flows.

EmFi solutions are forecast to reach a market size of US$606 billion by 2025, from US$264 billion in 2021, Funding Societies says, citing a recent study by PwC. The global B2B e-commerce market is already six times larger than that of B2C, with Asia-Pacific projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 22% until 2030, according to Inkwood Research.

Innovative payment options such as BNPL have become a key differentiating factor for an B2B buyer-merchant ecosystem, especially when 95% 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% 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,” says SGeBIZ group chief executive officer Edmund Louis Nathan said. “It is also extremely timely, with the uncertainty in the economic conditions, rising costs associated with food costs, labour, 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.

Launched in 2016, EzyProcure is a cloud-based platform that automates B2B ordering, invoice reconciliation and payment processes for food and beverage businesses with their suppliers.

Since its inception in 2015, Funding Societies has disbursed over S$5 billion (US$3.67 billion) in business financing through five million transactions to over 100,000 SMEs across its five markets in Southeast Asia, namely Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.