Market Watch Banca Ifis, SMEs team up to strengthen the supply chain and grow abroad

Short supply chains, trade credit to customers and suppliers, new digital platforms for greater integration between companies. Italian SMEs focus on the collaboration of the entire supply chain which is increasingly technological. A dynamic that the pandemic has highlighted as the strength of Made in Italy, from upstream to downstream in production, and which, according to the sentiment gathered by Banca Ifis’s latest Market Watch Pmi, will continue in the near future. The Bank, in collaboration with Format Research, listened to a representative sample of over 500 small and medium-sized Italian companies, noting that the pandemic has not affected the strength of Italian products on foreign markets which, however, remain mainly anchored to the European market. A geography of proximity that seems to be maintained over the next few years. The prospects for the two-year period 2022-23 see 80% of the sample confirm the export share, 16% increase it, while only 4% foresee a retreat. In the same period, even the smallest SMEs, under 50 employees, will keep the export quota unchanged. Cross-border growth will be mainly driven by an increase in demand from foreign countries (for 62% of the sample), by the improvement of international relations (49%) and by the Made in Italy brand (31%). If 70% of SMEs confirm that they will continue to preside over the international markets on which they already operate, the remaining 30% will go further, probing new opportunities in different geographies. The search for suppliers in the area, co-planning with customers but above all commercial credit and digital platforms are at the top of the responses of entrepreneurs and the cornerstones of supply chain collaboration. The report estimates an increase from 39% to 46% of companies that will enter into agreements to obtain trade credit. The share of SMEs that will collaborate to implement integrated platforms to facilitate supplier-customer communication is also significant, destined to rise from 19% in 2019 to 35% over the next two years. Technological innovation and collaboration between companies are two fundamental drivers for facilitating financial support throughout the supply chain. Banca Ifis, founded in 1983 as an operator specialized in factoring – a market where it still has the best competitive positioning today – has decided to digitize and automate the entire Supply Chain Finance process with the creation of Ifis4business. Ifis4business is a digital platform created to make life easier for the entrepreneur. An “business-friendly” online banking that enables all customers present in the entire factoring chain to have an entirely digital experience, without ever forgetting the value of the human and trustworthy relationship that the Bank continues to oversee with its 26 commercial branches and 110 business credit specialists, in the various territories of the Peninsula. In the last two years, SMEs have been able to adapt to change and become more efficient, overcoming the problems related to supply chains, so much so that the percentage of companies linked to foreign suppliers remains almost unchanged, before and after lockdown (from 47% to 46%). which mainly turn to the EU (70% of cases) to meet their needs for raw materials and components. A picture that does not appear destined to change in the next two years: according to 93% of the companies interviewed, between now and 2023, there will be no changes to the import model: just 2% expect a decrease while 5% assume an increase in supplies on foreign markets, in relation to the difficulty of finding supplies on the national territory (61%) and to the most competitive prices of raw materials outside the borders (45%).