If You Sell to Enterprise Customers, Here's Why Your Working Capital Costs Keep Rising

By: Ksusha McCormick, Chief Executive Officer
Published July 8, 2026 | Estimated read time: 2 min

When Charlotte and I founded OneAM two years ago, we believed technology had finally reached a point where small and midsize businesses could access a faster, more flexible way to finance their receivables. But we also recognized something more fundamental: the working capital gap wasn't just a technology problem - it was an incentive problem.  Even as fintech continues to evolve, the financial pressures facing large enterprises make it increasingly difficult for suppliers to access affordable early payment. Understanding those incentives is key to understanding why the working capital gap continues to widen. 

For decades, the best way for small suppliers to obtain affordable working capital was FROM their large customers.  The capital either came from an early pay program run off the buyer’s balance sheet (“dynamic discounting”) or via supply chain finance (“reverse factoring”), which is a program sponsored by a large corporate but funded with 3rd party capital, typically a bank’s.  While many large enterprises still offer one or both solutions, we've seen it become increasingly difficult for companies to expand these programs at affordable rates, even as suppliers need them more than ever. 

The first and most important reason is persistently high interest rates.  When cost of capital is high, cash on a corporate’s balance sheet becomes a precious resource.  That means a high opportunity cost of tying up balance sheet capital in an early pay program.  If the corporate raises money via bond markets, having extra cash on the balance sheet improves their leverage ratio, making it easier to manage their own debt load. 

Economic uncertainty has only reinforced this behavior. Volatile tariff policies, shifting regulations, geopolitical tensions, and fluctuating commodity prices all encourage companies to hold on to liquidity. At the same time, many enterprises are investing heavily in AI, modernizing infrastructure, or preparing for acquisitions. Those strategic priorities compete directly with supplier payment programs for available capital.  The result is predictable: buyers retain more cash, while suppliers wait longer to get paid or pay more to access their own cash flow. 

Working with hundreds of small and midsize businesses has given us a front-row seat to how these programs operate in practice.  Some early payment programs remain affordable and effective.  But many have become expensive enough to function as profit centers rather than supplier support programs.  Some buyers offer funding inconsistently, making it difficult for businesses to forecast cash flow with confidence.  We've also seen companies steer suppliers toward virtual card payments. While those solutions work well in some situations, high processing costs, transaction limits, and limited flexibility make them a poor fit for many businesses. 

The other common solution for working capital, supply chain finance (SCF), is typically limited to the largest vendors and inaccessible to smaller suppliers.  Prior to 2023, SCF provided buyers with an off-balance sheet way to extend their days payable outstanding.  Now, these programs must be disclosed in the notes to the financial statements of publicly traded companies.  As a result, the size of SCF programs is now visible, and public market investors view rapidly growing programs as red flags.  The new accounting treatment, along with a few recent bankruptcies such as First Brands and Tricolor, has brought off-balance sheet financing under scrutiny and limits whatever appetite corporate Treasurers may have had for expanding access to these programs. 

So where does that leave small and midsize suppliers? We at OneAM think we’ve built a compelling alternative.  Our end-to-end scheme is specifically designed for small and midsize businesses whose end customers are large, demanding, and take a long time to pay.  We make it easy for business owners to obtain fast, flexible, fairly priced financing without bothering their customers, and our platform relies on 3rd party capital from highly sophisticated, quantitative capital providers, who can underwrite quickly and price dynamically.  The end result?  Small businesses get the ability to win over strategically important customers while maintaining their independence and resilience.