Hiveterminal: Enterprise offering coming to the DACH region soon!
With the Hiveterminal’s tech team working on the upcoming entry into the DACH region markets with our new Enterprise offering, we wanted to explain the upcoming changes that are required for the platform to support the new functionality and allow enterprises in the region to acquire their own invoices through the use of the Automated Early Payment Gateway.
As SME businesses, that form the majority of Hiveterminal’s client base, were experiencing difficulties, Hiveterminal as a company needed to adapt and change their business model to account for, what in Slovenia is often called “the new reality”. While Hiveterminal will still aim to support SMEs in their struggle to guarantee liquidity for their companies faster, better, and cheaper, it is evident that many of the previously verified businesses were now lacking the very basic items that would have previously guaranteed them the finances they were seeking — invoices.
In order to mitigate this, Hiveterminal has rolled out its Enterprise plan quite publicly and simultaneously with the launch of our new website. The offering is simple: the ability for large companies to use Hiveterminal as a backbone for automating their early payments to supply chain companies they choose, at the rates they set, and with the manpower sourced through Hiveterminal.
We are happy to say, that Hiveterminal is now only weeks away from adding the necessary changes for the platform to also come alive in the DACH region. That includes the German localization of all platform functionality, as well as a modification to the core of the Hiveterminal platform itself.
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As Hiveterminal was conceived in 2017, the technical implementation was heavily linked to the existing service provider, Bisnode. The data on the business performance of individual companies could be retrieved by their business identification and/or VAT number, retuning various parameters later used in Hiveterminal’s invoice risk score calculation. It wasn’t a flaw but simply a result of trying to prove a business case with a PoC, in a tiny market, and with the shortest time-to-market possible. As usual with tech, it was great and it worked, but it limited the expansion, so further changes were warranted.
We soon came to realize that what we once believed would be the bottom of what we considered “normal” business data availability, Slovenia and the countries of Southeast Europe were the gold standard, with data for most businesses available for a reasonable price, through a single vendor. Sadly, the rest of Europe was way worse. With European databases, such as EBR still in their infancy, we had to find a new way to scale the business outside the borders of Slovenia. We had a VC company with plenty of business, tech, and crypto experience, and what was more important, could onboard their own clients and partner companies to the platform. On the technology side, these companies now received a similar score, but through a totally independent data source, one that was adaptable for different data sets and structures. That meant that Hiveterminal had a stable base into which many different data sources could be “plugged” and a Hiveterminal invoice risk score would be calculated.
However, due to the uncertainty looming over Europe and much of the World, primarily because of the COVID19 crisis, the Hiveterminal board has, after much deliberation, decided to only include the Enterprise offering functionality in the DACH market. We hope this will achieve two things. First, we are aiming for Hiveterminal to quickly hit profitability as a platform and as a result, secondly, it will ease market entry into the DACH countries.
The new functionality will allow big companies to register and add supply chain companies to the platform. These companies will, in the beginning, only be able to sell the invoices to one or more of the companies they are supplying goods to. That means that the Hiveterminal dev team has had to limit their ability in adding partnership companies, as well as offering the enterprise customers the ability to manipulate the risk score to their own tailor-made offering.
We expect the team to be able to test this functionality for Slovene and DACH markets within a week and then deploy it to production for use by the first partner companies.
Stay tuned.
