Who Funds, Who Decides, Who Aligns: Building the Team Behind Working Capital Optimization and Supply Chain Finance

Programs do not run themselves

Working capital optimization and Supply Chain Finance are often discussed as financial structures. In practice, both are organizational efforts. They span treasury, procurement, accounts payable, IT, legal, and accounting. They involve funders, technology platforms, and a large supplier base across multiple geographies. And they require sustained commitment over years, not weeks.

Before mapping who drives these programs, it helps to separate two things that are easy to conflate. Payment terms optimization determines what the commercial terms should be. Supply Chain Finance (SCF) determines how those terms can be funded efficiently. One sets the destination. The other provides the vehicle. The teams involved, and the order in which they engage, look different once that distinction is clear.

Understanding who initiates these programs, who funds them, and which internal teams need to be aligned is not organizational theory. It is a prerequisite for success. The strongest programs tend to share one structural characteristic: they are led by a multi-skilled, cross-functional team with genuine executive sponsorship. For CFOs, treasurers, and procurement leaders, that organizational architecture often determines whether a program scales or stalls.

Optimize before financing: why sequence shapes the team

Payment terms optimization and Supply Chain Finance solve different problems, and they call on the organization in a different order.

For many enterprises, payment terms have evolved over years of supplier negotiations, acquisitions, local practices, and internal policies. The result is often a portfolio of terms that reflects history more than strategy. Where terms can be extended sustainably, organizations generally benefit from understanding that opportunity first, benchmarked against market data, and then evaluating how financing can support both buyers and suppliers.

Financing programs such as approved payables finance and reverse factoring perform best when they complement a well-defined payment terms strategy, rather than serve as the sole reason to change terms. SCF is valuable and fair to suppliers when it is built this way. It simply works better once the terms themselves have been optimized.

You cannot optimize what you cannot benchmark. That is why the data layer, not the financing structure, is often where the largest part of the opportunity is won or lost.

The buyer organization: who initiates and who manages

Supply Chain Finance is a buyer-led solution. The buying organization initiates the program, defines the terms strategy it is meant to support, selects the financing structure, onboards suppliers, and manages the relationship with the funder or service provider.

Survey data consistently shows that treasury is the most common initiator of these programs, followed by the CFO or finance function and then procurement. That distribution reflects the natural ownership of the lever: treasury manages cash and banking relationships, and SCF is fundamentally a liquidity tool. But treasury cannot implement a program alone. Success depends on alignment across several functions:

• Treasury. Owns the program strategy, the funder relationship, and the working capital targets. Treasury is typically the internal champion who drives the initiative from concept through rollout.
• Procurement. Controls supplier relationships and negotiates payment terms. Any term change or SCF enrollment requires procurement's engagement. Without it, suppliers may receive a mixed message, and term targets may conflict with procurement's cost-reduction incentives.
• Accounts payable. Manages invoice approval and payment transfer. SCF implementation directly affects AP workflows, and the team must review how the platform integrates with existing ERP and payment systems.
• IT. Responsible for the interface between the ERP system and the external SCF platform. IT teams are typically resource-constrained and must assess onboarding complexity and ensure data is transmitted securely and accurately.
• Legal. Reviews and updates supplier contracts to reflect new payment terms, and helps ensure compliance with cross-border financing regulations, particularly for global programs.
• Accounting. Ensures SCF structures are treated correctly under accounting standards, so trade creditor obligations remain classified as accounts payable and are not reclassified as financial debt.

What is actually at stake for the buyer

The reason this alignment is worth the effort is the size of the prize. For buying organizations, the most visible benefit of optimizing payment terms is the working capital released.

Research and program data consistently indicate that a 30-day extension in payment terms can generate approximately $82 million of additional working capital per $1 billion of annual spend. For an organization with $5 billion in addressable supplier spend operating at 60-day terms while comparable companies operate closer to 90 days, that 30-day gap represents more than $400 million of potential liquidity sitting inside the balance sheet.

Financing alone cannot capture that gap. It can move cash and support suppliers, but the size of the opportunity is set by the terms, and the terms are set by benchmarking. That is why the question of which teams must be involved is one of the first to answer, not the last.

Funders: banks, non-banks, and an evolving capital base

On the funding side, commercial banks have historically been the dominant source of liquidity for Supply Chain Finance, originating the large majority of program assets. The biggest global programs are typically funded by major international banks.

The funding landscape is broadening. Non-bank funders, including pension funds, capital market investors, and corporate treasuries acting as self-funders, have grown their share of SCF assets meaningfully over the past decade. The trend continues as investors seek short-term, floating-rate assets with attractive risk-adjusted returns. For enterprise buyers, this shift creates new options:

• Multi-funder programs. Rather than relying on a single bank, large enterprises increasingly use multi-funding structures that bring together several institutions, reducing dependency on any one counterparty and increasing total funding capacity.
• Self-funding options. Companies with significant excess cash can participate as funders in their own programs, earning a higher return on that cash than a treasury account would provide while supporting their supply chain.
• Non-bank participation. Pension funds and capital market investors are drawn to SCF because it offers short-term, self-liquidating assets with low default rates, diversification from fixed-rate instruments, and yields that are generally higher than comparable short-term paper.

Service providers and technology platforms: the operational backbone

Between buyers, suppliers, and funders sits a layer of service providers and technology companies that make a program operational. The market for SCF technology has grown substantially, with specialist fintech providers steadily increasing their share of programs over the past two decades. These platforms handle supplier onboarding, invoice exchange, and funder connectivity.

Beneath them, software infrastructure providers supply the underlying systems used by banks and service providers, and a broader ecosystem of advisory firms supports program design, partner selection, and implementation. What this layer cannot supply, on its own, is market context: what comparable suppliers offer other customers, and what good looks like across an industry. That is a separate question from how a program is run, and it is the one that determines how much value the program can pursue.

What holds programs back: the alignment deficit

The most common reason these programs fall short of their potential is not a shortage of financing. It is a failure of internal alignment. When treasury initiates a program without procurement's genuine buy-in, suppliers receive conflicting messages. When accounting is not engaged early, reclassification risks create post-launch complications. When IT is not resourced for ERP integration, timelines extend by months.

The organizational architecture is as important as the financial structure. Organizations that invest in cross-functional alignment, shared KPIs, and executive sponsorship consistently build larger, faster, and more durable programs. Treasury cannot do it alone. Procurement cannot do it alone. The strongest programs start with a cross-functional steering group and a single, empowered program manager, working from a shared, benchmarked view of where the opportunity actually sits.

What Calculum adds to the process

Most organizations already have access to their own payment terms data. What they often lack is market context. Knowing that a supplier operates on 60-day terms is useful. Knowing that comparable suppliers in the same industry, geography, and category commonly operate on 90-day terms is actionable.

Calculum's payment terms intelligence platform provides visibility into payment terms across millions of companies globally, helping finance, treasury, and procurement teams benchmark current performance against market realities before negotiations begin. Rather than relying solely on internal assumptions, bank recommendations, or external consultants, teams can identify where opportunities exist, prioritize supplier segments, estimate potential DPO improvements, and quantify working capital impact.

The objective is not simply to finance payment terms more efficiently. It is to ensure the terms themselves are optimized before financing is applied, and to give the cross-functional team a single, shared view of the opportunity to align around.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we optimize payment terms or implement Supply Chain Finance first?

The most effective approach is typically to understand and optimize payment terms first, then evaluate how financing can support those terms. Payment terms optimization determines what the terms should be; SCF determines how they are funded. Benchmarking identifies the opportunity, and financing helps maximize and sustain it. Building a financing program on terms that were never benchmarked tends to leave the largest part of the opportunity untouched.

Which internal teams need to be involved to make a program effective?

A successful program generally requires active engagement from treasury (program ownership and funder relationships), procurement (supplier relationships and term negotiation), accounts payable (transaction processing), IT (ERP and platform integration), legal (contracts and compliance), and accounting (treatment of trade payables). The strongest programs also have a dedicated program manager, usually from treasury, who acts as the single point of contact across functions and with external partners.

Why is treasury usually the initiator?

Treasury's mandate includes managing cash, optimizing working capital, and maintaining banking relationships, and Supply Chain Finance touches all three. Treasury also has the technical knowledge to evaluate financing structures and the external relationships to initiate programs. Even so, treasury cannot deliver a program alone; procurement and the other functions are essential to execution.

How do non-bank funders participate?

Non-bank funders such as pension funds, money market funds, and capital market investors participate by purchasing the short-term trade receivables originated through SCF programs. They are attracted by the asset class's self-liquidating nature, low default rates, and floating-rate returns. They typically access these assets through direct investment, securitization vehicles, or secondary market purchases from originating banks.

How do you set up a supplier finance program?

A typical sequence is to analyze spend and suppliers to size the opportunity, benchmark payment terms to define realistic targets, set clear goals (DPO targets, cash flow objectives, supplier liquidity support), select a funder or service provider, align internal stakeholders across treasury, procurement, AP, IT, legal, and accounting, design supplier segmentation and onboarding, and launch with a focused group of high-value suppliers before scaling. The process commonly takes six to twelve months from initiation to live program.

About Calculum

Calculum's payment terms intelligence platform helps organizations benchmark payment terms, identify working capital opportunities, and support data-driven payment terms strategies. By combining market intelligence, benchmarking, and analytics, Calculum helps finance, treasury, and procurement teams make more informed decisions about one of the largest levers available within the balance sheet.