Case Study: European Electronics Retailer

Omnichannel Approach Guides Large European Electronics Retailer’s Digital Transformation Efforts

The Client:

This iconic, large omnichannel electronics and white goods retailer with sales of over $12 Billion serves several markets in Europe. It sells to both B2C and B2B, including corporate, resellers, insurers, government-funded bodies and SMBs.

The Challenge:

Competitive Landscape

The market size for consumer electronics in Europe is forecast to be $208.5 Billion in 2023. Competitors include well-known retailers selling electronic goods, OEMs that have adopted a “direct-to-consumer” (“D2C”) model, online only retail specialists for electronics, and marketplaces such as Amazon. The online-only and marketplace competitors compete with this retailer without the burden of maintaining a network of physical assets and the resulting pressure on requiring ROCE (Return on Capital Employed).

Business Challenges and Market Forces

The competition, combined with slow adoption of digital transformation hampered this organization’s ability to effectively compete online resulting in an erosion of market share.

Economic factors stemming from the financial crisis in 2008, and more recently, because of the global pandemic, heightened the retailer’s adversity to risk. This caused them to adopt a defensive risk posture, reduce credit lines previously extended to business customers and reduce their customer base by 50%.

Pressures on OPEX stemming from competitive forces, the economy and low return on capital employed had left them in a position of needing to reassess resource deployment for growing B2B.

Growing the B2B Channel

Aspiring to recover and grow their B2B sales volume and appeal to a wider range of business buyers (including SMBs, more large resellers and compete effectively in Government tenders), the retailer wanted to:

1. Optimize technology to grow and provide a B2B user experience to compete effectively. This would require investment in the design, technology and deployment of such a solution.
2. Recover their lost customers and grow market share, in B2B verticals.
3. Onboard customers and concentrate on selling and serving them without the risk of late payment, bad debt, and resource intensity [note: as new customers are acquired by the retailer’s sales teams, investment, and growth in further resources to onboard, underwrite, manage, bill to and collect from the customers would be required thus increasing operational expenditure].

Why TreviPay?

Trust

TreviPay, a unique “TechFin” that combines its foundation as a technology company, with world-class managed services and agnostic financing capability either through the client’s own source, a third-party bank or TreviPay resource. With more than four decades of experience with B2B payments in Europe, TreviPay supports some of the largest companies in the world and has been selected by major retailers in other markets.

Technology

TreviPay’s deep experience and omnichannel capability affirms TreviPay’s position as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to their clients. TreviPay’s depth and breadth of connectivity to clients, agnosticism to third-party point of sale (POS) systems and eCommerce platforms delivered through simple API integration is a renowned differentiator.

TreviPay subject matter experts and product managers worked with the retailer early in the sales process to demonstrate TreviPay’s capabilities, but more importantly to “think strategically” with the retailer to help them consider the B2B user experience in the context of the retailer’s own B2B strategy and capabilities. TreviPay’s team interacted with all third-party system providers to ensure the solution was flawlessly integrated, tested, and executed to a mutually agreed timeline.

TreviPay’s technology and expertise stem from decades of iteration and investment. The retailer recognized the benefit of leveraging TreviPay’s experience on a SaaS-basis, to fast-track their digital transformation journey from a B2B omnichannel sales perspective.

Managed Services

TreviPay demonstrated scale, expertise and capability to provide a privately labeled end-to-end solution; from buyer onboarding and underwriting, through credit management, invoicing, accounts receivable and cash application.

Furthermore, TreviPay’s ability to underwrite a diverse range of B2B buyers, including large corporate buyers, and provide substantial credit facilities into the tens of millions of pounds differentiated TreviPay from the competition.

TreviPay’s scalability and business process outsourcing enabled the client to optimize and reallocate their human capital from the order-to-cash process flow in a cost-effective manner. The result is that the retailer could focus on core activities and orient towards achieving their stated business strategy without the risk and administrative burden of running an in-house program.

Financing

With their global scale, and significant readily scalable banking facility, TreviPay irradicated the retailer’s DSO, ensuring payment within 2 days from the date of each transaction, on time, every time. By leveraging TreviPay, the retailer benefited by removing large amounts of unpaid receivables from their monthly balance sheet, while de-risking their B2B sales channel and optimizing their net cash position.