Can you tell a bit more about Renewi and your role?
Igor Penders: 'Renewi is a leading waste-to-product company that gives new life to used materials every day with over 8,000 employees. With over 200 branches in nine countries and a turnover of EUR 1.8 billion, we are always close to our customers.
'The finance and payroll activities are housed in a Shared Service Centre (SSC) localised in Lommel, Belgium. In this SSC, I am responsible for the Billing, Credit Management and Collections departments. Here, we handle billing and accounts receivable management for almost all branches.'
What major challenges do you see within credit management?
'Developments are moving from standardisation to customisation, and certainly in an SSC environment this is a challenge. On the one hand, we try to work uniformly and unambiguously, which benefits efficiency. On the other hand, a personal approach is desirable, which benefits the end result. Furthermore, working with big data is developing strongly and the challenge there is not to lose sight of the goal in the huge amounts of data. Good Business Intelligence tools help us with this. Finally, we notice that our customers are increasingly moving to e-billing platforms, which affects invoice acceptance, approval and payment terms. The challenge is to make good agreements about this with the customer, but of course also with our own Sales colleagues.'
Will digitalisation influence the role of credit management? What other developments do you see?
'Digitisation is definitely going to influence credit management, as indicated above. What is also increasingly influential is the shift from reactive debtor management to proactive credit management, even though this development started some time ago. It actually means that we increasingly want to know in advance who we are doing business with (in the broadest sense), preferably have some risk covered and know changes in our customers' financial position quickly. With that knowledge, we can enter into timely consultations with the customer, think along in solutions and thus achieve more than if you are behind the times.'
Will there still be a need for the 'traditional' credit manager in a few years' time?
'The word "traditional" implies sticking to old habits and, in my opinion, there has never been a need for the "traditional" credit manager. I do think there was, is and will be a need for credit managers who listen to the market and stakeholders and colleagues and tailor their process accordingly. Consequentially, though, the job content is subject to change.'
In conclusion, do you have any good tips for credit managers?
'Perhaps an open door, but as a credit manager, you are only as strong as the team around you. I listen a lot to their feedback, experiences and knowledge and learn from them every day. By the way, I hope there is some interaction as well.'
We thank Igor for this candid interview and hope his view on the world of credit management has inspired you. If you have any questions about (developments within) credit management? You can always come to us with this!
