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B2B fish and meat marketplace, Meatex, used Kriya Payment's flexible embedded finance solution to stand out from their competition and scale their growth.
Goal
Region
United Kingdom
Industry
Food manufacturing
The Challenge
Lack of flexibility from their credit providers
The Solution
B2B buy now pay later with flexible payment terms
Meat Market: A wholesaler turns into a B2B marketplace.
Meatex started off as a traditional meat and fish wholesaler. Recently they saw an opportunity to connect even more suppliers and buyers by becoming an online B2B marketplace. Kriya was the perfect partner to help on their digitisation journey. Read on to discover their story.
Meatex levels out the meat industry playing field
Meatex champions the small guy. The meat industry has seen a lot of consolidation and mergers in recent years, resulting in fewer, bigger companies focused on supermarkets. This means smaller businesses have been squeezed out. Meatex exists to give all of their customers – retailers, wholesalers, caterers and manufacturers – equal access to the best products and prices in the industry.
Tony Vardy, their Founder and Managing Director, started his career working as an apprentice butcher in 1983. He saw the potential in trading meat differently and so set up Meatex with wife in 2012.
Breaking away from the old-fashioned ways of the industry, Meatex embraced technology, making it as easy as possible for customers to buy from them. They consider themselves a gateway to the big players in the meat industry, leveraging their great level of buying power to access the best products at the best prices and pass it along to their customers.
One of the key features of their platform is the amazing customer experience – the whole Meatex team has years of expertise in the industry. They’re only a phone call away, ensuring every customer can get the information and personalised service they need.
Why Meatex decided to offer embedded finance via a partner
The majority of Meatex’s sales happen offline, facilitated via phone and email by their team. Knowing the importance of flexible payment terms, they offered most of their buyers 28 day terms. This could fluctuate depending on how well they knew the customer – sometimes being 14 days or pro-forma. To lessen the strain on their cash flow they in turn paid suppliers after 28 days.
Although the need for credit was clear there were many limitations to offering it themselves. Customer onboarding created friction – performing Know You Customer (KYC) checks and fraud assessment can be challenging and risky without experience. They were also more limited when offering credit limits as their own capital was at stake. In turn, this meant not always being able to satisfy the needs of their customers. The process was mostly offline, meaning lots of invoices being shuffled back and forth, and manual work required from the team.
Why Meatex chose Kriya as their B2B buy now pay later provider
What appealed to Meatex about Kriya Payments was the flexibility it provided to their customers. 28 day credit terms are industry standard as many merchants use insurance and credit facilities which offer those terms. However, Meatex wanted to stand out from their competitors and offer even more flexibility.
“It was all about wanting to offer a better service to our customers, we wanted to offer something that no one else in the trade would do. Offering two options on the terms and offering that experience through an online portal. The whole world is going online slowly and slowly. We’re seeing it everywhere now. The meat trade is in the stone ages and we are trying to bring that forward.” - Ross Whetton, Sales Director
And the integration process couldn’t have been easier! Meatex was the first marketplace to use our WooCommerce plug-in, meaning implementing Kriya Payments took a couple of minutes and required minimal commitment from their tech team. Read more about the WooCommerce plug-in and Meatex’s experience.
The impact Kriya Payments made on Meatex
Since launching in August 2022 we have seen some amazing results! We’ve advanced over £1M worth of orders and their total sales increased by 45%. They also saw a 400% increase in total sales for January and February in comparison to the year prior.
“By working with Kriya, we are able to offer our customers 30 and 60 days credit instantly without ever leaving the Meatex site. Integrating Kriya Payments has been quick and simple, the team were supportive throughout the whole process and we are already seeing results! Customers love the new offering and our sales team love being able to offer instant credit accounts to customers.” - Tony Vardy, Managing Director
The Meatex spirit is mighty and we’ve had a blast working together. It’s been amazing to see their growth over the last couple of months and we can’t wait to see what else we can achieve together. Click here to see our Christmas gift from the Meatex team!
Offer flexible payment options to your customers
Are you a B2B business looking to offer buy now pay later? Don’t wait, get in touch now! Our team will help you figure out your needs and how we can help.
“We expect our B2B revenues to double as a result of providing Kriya’s flexible payment terms to our trade and business buyers.” Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
Halfords is the UK’s leading provider of motoring and cycling services and products. Its customers shop across over 1,750 fixed and mobile locations including, Halfords stores and garages, as well as its website, halfords.com.
Today, around a quarter of Halfords turnover is business-to-business. They sell to organisations of all sizes including SME businesses, garages, and workshops, offering discounts on automotive parts and tools with their Trade Card, as well as directly to larger commercial and government customers that buy in bulk.
However, like many well-established enterprises, Halfords found its future growth was challenged by the legacy processes of its past. Find out how they’ve teamed up with Kriya to remove the friction from their B2B commerce.
Halford's challenges
“The exam question” says Halfords’ Head of Financial Services, Stuart Zissman, “was how do we make selling to business and trade buyers less labour-intensive?” Having already overseen a successful consumer finance proposition at Halfords, it was clear to Zissman that their B2B offering had potential to grow by introducing a simple and effective credit solution.
1. B2B buyers expect payments terms
“All successful B2B propositions have some sort of financial support” Zissman explains. Whether large or small, Halfords’ business buyers want to be invoiced on payment terms. This is especially beneficial for garages and workshops, which thrive on efficient working capital cycles, allowing them to source parts upfront and defer payment until they have received compensation for their services.
Halfords recognised the opportunity to enhance their offerings by providing scalable trade credit, which was previously untapped. As Zissman says, "offering payments completes the circle."
2. Manual, unscalable processes were holding back growth
Halfords' hands-on approach to B2B processes presented an opportunity for greater scalability and growth. Wholesale orders, managed via account managers, involved manual quotes and purchase orders, which added complexity.
“We’d like to say yes to every single customer that wants to order from us,” says Head of Trade Card, Chris Millan. However, processing these detailed orders for existing buyers took time, limiting the retailer's ability to proactively attract new business and expand their account base.
What Halfords sought was a way to make their B2B offering more accessible and achieve a better economy of scale.
“We work with sole traders, business customers and government entities. Kriya is the only supplier that could support all three.” Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
The search for a solution
Recognising the need for change, Halfords set out to find a way to modernise its B2B offering. With Kriya's 12-year track record and willingness to collaborate on a solution for their unique requirements struck a chord with Halfords.
A solution for all B2B buyers
Halfords has a diverse buyer base and needed B2B payment terms that could be offered to limited companies, government entities and sole traders.
Multichannel
With trade customers already purchasing online and in-store, Halfords needed a solution to offer payment terms holistically across their sales channels.
Risk expertise
With their focus on Motoring and Cycling, Halfords sought a partner with strong expertise in finance and payments, including robust credit and fraud detection capabilities, to help onboard their buyers.
“We are experts in motoring and cycling, and to ensure exceptional service for our customers, we decided to partner with Kriya, specialists in B2B payments and lending decisions.” Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
The B2B vision
Halfords partnered with Kriya to transform their B2B offering. By integrating Kriya PayLater with their Trade Card, the retailer is combining trade discounts for B2B buyers with the ability to pay on account for online and in-store orders.
Adopting an eCommerce-first model has a number of advantages. Firstly, providing online buyers with highly-demanded payment terms expands the businesses they can sell to. Secondly, much of their offline business can be shifted to a self-serve, online checkout. Not only does this provide a smoother buyer experience, it also frees up the Halfords team to focus on the customers where their expertise has the most impact.
The near-infinite scalability of the Kriya solution means Halfords can not only improve their overall B2B customer proposition and experience, but they can also see financial benefits through the partnership too.
“Offering trade credit through payments makes it much slicker. It’s something buyers are familiar with from the consumer world.”Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
Wholesale change
Halfords have kicked off their payments transformation with their wholesale offering.
Business buyers come to the Halfords wholesale team to place bulk orders and request custom details, such as branded bikes and accessories. Before Kriya, this fully offline sales channel required multiple teams and processes to transact each order. This process led to delays and hampered conversion, such as inventory becoming unavailable during the order, or customers purchasing elsewhere.
By streamlining the entire wholesale workflow into Kriya Merchant Portal, Halfords now have a single, automated flow for processing orders.
Wholesale buyers are first onboarded into Merchant Portal. This screens for credit and fraud risk, directly providing their sales team an instant spending limit decision for the buyer. Orders can then be placed on payment terms and invoices are automatically generated for the buyer. Additionally, Kriya assists with credit control by managing payment collections too.
“We needed a way forward that was less hands-on because the whole process was very, very manual.” Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
How it works
1
The buyer places a wholesale order with Halfords
2
Halfords onboard the buyer into Kriya’s Merchant Portal
3
Payment terms selected and purchase complete. The buyer pays at the end of the following month.
Partnering for growth
Reflecting on the journey so far with Kriya, Zissman says “It’s that personal touch and relationship that makes the difference to the product we’re building together.” For Zissman, it's not simply outsourcing the expertise to a third party. “It’s more like we’re onboarding Kriya into Halfords and by extension they’ve become part of our team”.
There’s a busy roadmap ahead for Halfords and Kriya, with plans to bring the whole multichannel offering to market by the autumn of 2024.
We're very excited about this development,” says Millan. “Introducing payment terms to our Trade offering eliminates barriers that previously slowed us down and unlocks opportunities with a vast number of businesses we haven't historically engaged with.”
B2B Payments to boost your growth
To learn more about our payments and digital trade credit solutions book a call with us today.
"Integrating Kriya Payments has been quick and simple, the team were supportive throughout the whole process and we are already seeing results! Customers love the new offering and our sales team love being able to offer instant credit accounts to customers.”
Tony Vardy
Managing Director
|
Meatex
Challenge
Lack of flexibility from their credit providers
Solution
B2B buy now pay later with flexible payment terms
Meat Market: A wholesaler turns into a B2B marketplace.
Meatex started off as a traditional meat and fish wholesaler. Recently they saw an opportunity to connect even more suppliers and buyers by becoming an online B2B marketplace. Kriya was the perfect partner to help on their digitisation journey. Read on to discover their story.
Meatex levels out the meat industry playing field
Meatex champions the small guy. The meat industry has seen a lot of consolidation and mergers in recent years, resulting in fewer, bigger companies focused on supermarkets. This means smaller businesses have been squeezed out. Meatex exists to give all of their customers – retailers, wholesalers, caterers and manufacturers – equal access to the best products and prices in the industry.
Tony Vardy, their Founder and Managing Director, started his career working as an apprentice butcher in 1983. He saw the potential in trading meat differently and so set up Meatex with wife in 2012.
Breaking away from the old-fashioned ways of the industry, Meatex embraced technology, making it as easy as possible for customers to buy from them. They consider themselves a gateway to the big players in the meat industry, leveraging their great level of buying power to access the best products at the best prices and pass it along to their customers.
One of the key features of their platform is the amazing customer experience – the whole Meatex team has years of expertise in the industry. They’re only a phone call away, ensuring every customer can get the information and personalised service they need.
Why Meatex decided to offer embedded finance via a partner
The majority of Meatex’s sales happen offline, facilitated via phone and email by their team. Knowing the importance of flexible payment terms, they offered most of their buyers 28 day terms. This could fluctuate depending on how well they knew the customer – sometimes being 14 days or pro-forma. To lessen the strain on their cash flow they in turn paid suppliers after 28 days.
Although the need for credit was clear there were many limitations to offering it themselves. Customer onboarding created friction – performing Know You Customer (KYC) checks and fraud assessment can be challenging and risky without experience. They were also more limited when offering credit limits as their own capital was at stake. In turn, this meant not always being able to satisfy the needs of their customers. The process was mostly offline, meaning lots of invoices being shuffled back and forth, and manual work required from the team.
Why Meatex chose Kriya as their B2B buy now pay later provider
What appealed to Meatex about Kriya Payments was the flexibility it provided to their customers. 28 day credit terms are industry standard as many merchants use insurance and credit facilities which offer those terms. However, Meatex wanted to stand out from their competitors and offer even more flexibility.
“It was all about wanting to offer a better service to our customers, we wanted to offer something that no one else in the trade would do. Offering two options on the terms and offering that experience through an online portal. The whole world is going online slowly and slowly. We’re seeing it everywhere now. The meat trade is in the stone ages and we are trying to bring that forward.” - Ross Whetton, Sales Director
And the integration process couldn’t have been easier! Meatex was the first marketplace to use our WooCommerce plug-in, meaning implementing Kriya Payments took a couple of minutes and required minimal commitment from their tech team. Read more about the WooCommerce plug-in and Meatex’s experience.
The impact Kriya Payments made on Meatex
Since launching in August 2022 we have seen some amazing results! We’ve advanced over £1M worth of orders and their total sales increased by 45%. They also saw a 400% increase in total sales for January and February in comparison to the year prior.
“By working with Kriya, we are able to offer our customers 30 and 60 days credit instantly without ever leaving the Meatex site. Integrating Kriya Payments has been quick and simple, the team were supportive throughout the whole process and we are already seeing results! Customers love the new offering and our sales team love being able to offer instant credit accounts to customers.” - Tony Vardy, Managing Director
The Meatex spirit is mighty and we’ve had a blast working together. It’s been amazing to see their growth over the last couple of months and we can’t wait to see what else we can achieve together. Click here to see our Christmas gift from the Meatex team!
Offer flexible payment options to your customers
Are you a B2B business looking to offer buy now pay later? Don’t wait, get in touch now! Our team will help you figure out your needs and how we can help.
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