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INVOICE MARKETS
Decentralized Finance (or DeFi) is known as one of the most promising movements at this moment. It concerns the ecosystem of financial applications built with blockchain technology. This ecosystem promises a global and open alternative to every current financial service ever developed. Invoicing is no exception. Invoices encompassed an estimated 550 billion annual volume of paper and electronic bills in 2019. Electronic invoices expect to experience a growth of 400% in the coming years. Currently, most invoices are still paper documents, but e-invoicing is becoming more common. Estimations state that by 2030 e-invoicing will replace paper invoices as the predominant form of invoicing.
What is Invoice Market?
The invoice market is a place where invoices trade as a financial instrument: factoring companies finance invoices, fintech companies, and banks. For now, we will call those: Originators. At Invoice Market, Originators can sell invoices to Institutional investors. The Institutional Investors profit from the invoices, and the Originators free capital by distributing their balance sheet risk.
This process goes as follows:
- A seller (Company A) sells a product or service to a debtor (Company B). The seller creates an invoice.
- After verification, the factoring company acquires the invoice in return for financing (usually around 80 to 95% of the total invoice).
- The financier holds the risk of the invoice on their balance sheet and is required to hold capital for that risk. As these costs are high, financiers tend to look to distribute the risk to investors.
- Investors buy the invoice and take over the risk of the financier.
- When the payment term is due and the invoice paid by the debtor (Company B), the financier receives the total value of the invoice.
The platform then distributes the remainder of the invoice to the investors.
The use-case
This use case aims to make invoice markets more efficient by creating a non-fungible token (NFT) that will represent the invoice, the underlying receivable cash flow, and have all the functions of an invoice programmed in it built on a DLT specific ledger with an agnostic smart contract
In the Invoice Market use case, the invoice plays a significant role. And there are several issues with invoices and the way they function in an invoice market:
- There is no standard invoice format
- Verification of invoices is cumbersome, leading to unverified invoices being seen as secure titles
- Double spending issues
- Manual payments are prone to error
A tokenized Invoice Market aims to make invoices widely available to investors as a new asset class and overcome the aforementioned issues. Tokenizing invoices create this new asset class on a distributed ledger platform, creating a highly scalable and transparent platform. The platforms (such as banks, factoring companies, and fintech companies) can sell invoices on the invoice market as a new asset class.
After the platforms have acquired invoices that they want to distribute, the invoices are tokenized, put on a distributed ledger, and added to the platform's wallet. An investor can buy this token either as a single asset or a portfolio of tokens fully automated with software acting on predetermined criteria or by automated negotiations (via Smart Contracts, for instance).
Read our blog post for more detailed information on this use case.
Watch the webinar on the Invoice Market use-case on-demand!
On the 12th of April, we hosted the first webinar in our ‘Introduction to our use cases’ series together with ABN AMRO and Digital Asset. We explained the ins and outs of what an invoice market is, what token we will develop, and how to use the DAML programming language to create such a token.
You can now watch the webinar on-demand by clicking on the button below!Want to join this use case? Feel free to contact us at info@2tokens.org. or fill in our contact form.
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