Financing the End to End Supply Chain

Today Buyers Meeting Point welcomes Charles Findlay as our guest. Charles graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Engineering Science and then spent five years with GEC as an industrial engineer working in various manufacturing industries in Europe and the United States. Following an MBA from London Business School, he joined Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, first in the Strategy practice, then running the UK Supply Chain practice and finally helping set up the Procurement out- sourcing business. For the last few years he has worked as an independent consultant, an angel investor in early stage technology companies and a founder member of the Supply Chain Finance Community.

Earlier this year, Charles co-authored Financing the End to End Supply Chain with Simon Templar and Erik Hofmann. My review of the book is available on Buyers Meeting Point. Listeners may also be interested in reading Charles' recent blog post, 'Supply Chain Finance - Who Wins?'

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The structure and players in the supply chain finance 'ecosystem'
• How a cross functional group can come together to implement a supply chain finance program
• The wide variety of supply chain finance starting points, and whether they lead to blue sky opportunities or problems with standardization
• The impact of the public sector, regulatory bodies, and political climate on supply chain finance