From the CEO: New Markets, New Functionalities
During the month of May, Senior Management came together in Slovenia for a month to review the progress of first 100 days of 2019, determine what lies ahead for Hiveterminal, renew our business development roadmap and set a new timeline for adding product functionalities. We have done some unique stuff, stuff that has never been seen before in the invoice financing industry, and we will continue with innovation in the future, hopefully on a much larger scale. With the first 1000 companies registered, additional corporations in the pipeline, the strategy for growth and expansion redesigned and in the realization phase, and with blockchain technology slowly penetrating the global invoice financing sector, we feel we are perfectly positioned for expansion.
It gives us great pleasure to see the invoice financing sector evolving in a way that the blockchain is becoming a new reality. Just a few days ago, we saw Russia‘s third largest food retail firm implement blockchain technology into its corporate finance system. We will see that large financing corporations are going to move in the same direction and I am happy to see Hiveterminal ahead of the industry, with our technology and business already waiting to be granted exclusivity in a patent-pending procedure and satisfied customers in our first market. This will help us immensely when the time comes to expand to new markets, either by ourselves or with carefully chosen strategic partners.
We have added important functionalities to the platform, grown exponentially in terms of registered users, hosted more than 20 events for Slovenian SMEs and investors in the past 100 days alone. We have had also more than EUR 50,000 worth of invoices funded so far, with investors receiving ROI and Slovenian companies getting the money they need to thrive in their business through the blockchain-based invoice financing platform. We have, however, come across some roadblocks to that needed to be addressed urgently. We had EUR 201,367 in invoices that unfortunately could not get sold on our marketplace as debtors did not provide confirmation for them. We will address that with an update of our business model shortly, resolving this with a form of “flash,” non-recourse factoring, providing invoice sellers with an opportunity to sell invoices without confirmation, but at the same time giving investors considerably higher ROI for these invoices.
That was not the only set back we encountered. Our ERP plugin should have been implemented and reviewed by Microsoft some time ago. This set back has been costly to us as some larger companies, which previously announced that they will start using Hiveterminal as their early payment discounting platform, are waiting for automation that the plug-in will provide.
However, literally as I was writing this blog post, we received confirmation that our ERP plugin for 365FO and NAV have been approved and released. Now, any company using MS Dynamics 36FO can download it from Microsoft AppSource and connect it to their Hiveterminal account.
The ERP plug-in will streamline the adoption of the platform among bigger debtor companies and automate a lot of the previously manual interaction with the platform. Developed in joint cooperation with Adacta, the Hiveterminal ERP is now available for installation! We now have an open highway to all Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (365FO) and NAV users and our marketing and sales teams are already launching activities to reach out to them and bring them to Hiveterminal. We will present the long-awaited ERP plug-in and its functionalities (with an exact “how does it work” section and videos) to our community and users in the days ahead.
1000 Registered Companies is Now a Reality!
Just a few days ago, we passed an important milestone in our business development, with the 1000th company registered by our very own call center employees. Our growth in the last three months is impressive and we are happy to see our team successfully reaching our internal goals. We are constantly pushing all registered companies through our funnel with follow-up calls, e-mail campaigns, and direct mail to convince them to start selling invoices on Hiveterminal.
With this achievement surpassed, we sat together with the team to create a business and tech development roadmap, determine key obstacles and threats to our success, and set new KPIs for the near future.
Business Development: Growth is the Key Word
We know Hiveterminal has amazing potential to grow, not only on our first market, but in global terms as well. Our team, with Ugur leading the way, is currently working on realizing two different paths:
Organic growth: We have launched a strategy to implement organic growth in Slovenia’s neighboring countries and will be able to serve as regional center. The team has already made the initial steps, with legal and business analysis for market adoption in Croatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria, and Hungary.
Strategic growth: Focused on strategic partnerships. The team under our CFO’s leadership has established a shortlist of strategic partners like banks, factoring companies, and other legal entities. These institutions are from Germany, Poland, Turkey, and Greece, and we are currently defining rules of engagement for these partnerships.
We have also discovered some potential areas for UX improvements in the Q1/Q2 period and set all our efforts towards providing our users with impactful improvements. One of the first important updates is already in the staging environment/internal testing stage (the “flash” sale function, a.k.a “forced approval“) and with only 1 in 5 invoices receiving the green light under our current conditions, we can expect fast growth in invoices available for purchase and faster adoption, as our marketing and sales team has new benefits to offer.
Product Development: Adding Functionalities
The team, under the leadership of Dejan Jovanovic, our CTO, has created a very intense timeline of releases, with the first, as described, happening in the next 14 days. “Flash” sales will take center stage of it all.
Other releases in the next 100 days will contain some other important functionalities and features, such as:
- An invoice buyer dashboard;
- New ERP integrations;
- Upgrade on notification functionality;
- Improvements to our rating engine;
- And many other smaller improvements of the UX and other functionalities.
Moving Forward
We are moving forward on a daily basis and I am positive about our future growth, both organic and with partnerships, and in terms of platform functionalities. While there will be setbacks, we have proven we can overcome difficulties and rise to new highs while delivering a state-of-the-art product.
Jure
