While wandering the Web, I stumbled across a company, Prime Revenue, that offers to optimize the "financial supply chain" of its customers.
PrimeRevenue is the key to a financially optimized supply chain. For Buyers and Suppliers.
Our program is an innovative and unparalleled solution that brings the benefits of information technology to the financial supply chain. Our services deliver greater working capital efficiency, cost savings, and revenue growth opportunities for both Buyers and Suppliers.
With our program, Buyers provide Suppliers with transaction visibility and payment certainty around trade payables to their Suppliers, reducing the amount of cash tied up in the order-to-cash cycle. Our services streamline AR/AP processes, link the flow of funds to the flow of transaction data and, by creating visibility into future cash flows, give corporations access to a variety of transaction level financing options at very attractive rates.
Simply stated, PrimeRevenue helps companies do more business with less working capital.
Although apparently not a new concept (there’s a link on their website
to a fairly sophisticated vision of it in an article written in 2000),
the integrated communications and software infrastructure for implementing it are
only now reaching the maturation to support it.
On another Web sojourn, I encountered Wells Fargo’s Commercial Electronic Office (CEO), a proprietary financial portal that claims to provide "cash management, credit, international, and trust and investment services all in once place with a single sign on". Maybe so, but my experience with banks suggest that would be something of a stretch. (Wells had even applied bankers’ bureaucratese to the term e-commerce, turning a concise word into a mouthful of multi-syllabic mush.) My instincts and experience with online media content tell me that a proprietary business model will not stand. For the same underlying economic reasons that it would make no sense for Yahoo, MSN or AOL to limit their available market to that of one communications company (as in cable or telco), it would make no sense for a true financial portal to limit its market to the available market of a given depository institution (even if owned by that institution).
This is worthy of futher "focused" Web wanderings, thought and conversation.