Why the Future of Working Capital Belongs to the Data-Driven

By: Ksusha McCormick, Chief Executive Officer, OneAM
Published Thursday, May 22, 2025 | Estimated read time: 2 min

Small and midsize B2B suppliers to large enterprise companies are in many ways the backbone of the U.S. economy.  Without them, enterprises would not be able to function.  But when it comes to payment terms and the cost of improving them, what should be a cooperative relationship can break down into an unfair fight.  Quite frequently, the large buyers either can’t be bothered to support their suppliers, or they ask, “what’s in it for me?” and take their cut.  The key to solving this problem, which is experienced across more than $4T of annual spend in the US, is helping the smaller businesses bridge the working capital gap in an affordable way without having to rely on the benevolence of their end customers. 

When it comes to the cost of capital, the old paradigm was simple.  Public, large company meant low risk and low-cost financing.  Private, small companies meant high risk and expensive.  However, a sea change is underway, and it can mean dramatically better options for businesses deemed high risk by traditional capital providers. 

What’s changing?  Put simply, it’s the availability and usability of data.  The data set available to evaluate the credit-worthiness of a business is larger than it’s ever been, ranging from traditional to non-traditional and structured to unstructured.  At the same time, the tools for organizing, unifying, and extracting insights from data have also become more sophisticated, with AI/ML capabilities accelerating the speed of innovation. 

For businesses that were underserved by the old way of doing things, this is a potential game-changer.  After all, a capital provider possessing data-and-analytics savvy can evaluate a business much more fully.  And in a competitive marketplace, a more sophisticated investor will be able to extend better financing terms while still managing its risk.   

The only problem here is that traditional capital providers dominate the landscape, and accessing the more quantitative sources of funding is not easy.  This is the gap that we at OneAM are trying to address.  Behind OneAM’s elegant, user-friendly process for obtaining early pay, there’s powerful infrastructure that enables sophisticated, quantitative capital providers to harness the fullest possible data set and the most robust analytics to assess the risk of a large number of small receivables quickly and efficiently.  The result, for businesses whose strength was overlooked under the old paradigm, is that connecting to a new source of financing can mean unlocking substantially more working capital, at a much more affordable price. 

Learn more on our website and schedule a demo at info@oneam.us.