At Shyft, we’re breaking the cycle of prolonged payments with our trusted ShyftX partners by enabling seamless access to payments for moving services with Shyft Instant Payments.
Despite its challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic has provided an important catalyst for instant payments, which is now available in more than 50 countries worldwide. Despite global innovation, the moving industry is still stuck in the 30/60/90, and even 120 day payment cycle.
This has become a massive barrier for some of our partners, often small, family owned companies, who are finding it difficult to survive because the wait for payments has become unsustainable.
We created Shyft Instant Payments to address this issue, and have, over the past five months rolled this technology out with our partners in the Shyft supply chain.
Ekomovers, one of the established, longtime moving companies in our supply chain, was the first to trial this technology. We sat down with Kris Natarajan, Owner & President of EkoMovers, to find out the state of the industry, how payments is changing and how Shyft Instant Payments is a positive force within the industry.
1. Please tell us more about Ekomovers, and what differentiates you from other moving companies in the industry?
First, it goes without saying, we have a passionate and hardworking team, which is the backbone of our company.
From a business model perspective, we do dedicated trucks at affordable prices and super fast delivery for customers. The reason we are able to do this is partly because we are a Fedex custom critical carrier and we keep our trucks loaded most times.
We are also obsessed with constantly improving ourselves and serving our customers better.
2. Can you tell us about the difference between working with individual customers and corporate clients in terms of payments?
Individual customers pay a deposit before the move and the rest is collected on the day of the job. So, it is a negative working capital for us, which we love and affords us more flexibility. Corporate customers pay 30 days or more after the move.
On the other hand, corporate customers are way more organized and prepared for the move. They also afford us consistent volume compared to individual customers.
3. Since the start of the pandemic, have you had to wait longer for corporate payments?
Absolutely. Industry wide, we have noticed corporate customers struggle to meet the net 30 day payment terms.
4. How does the long waiting period for payments impact your business?
It limits our growth. I remember last summer, we had to decline multiple jobs because we did not have enough working capital to fund them, even though we had truck and crew capacity.
5. How would it impact your business if all your corporate payments were made within 72 hours?
This will definitely enable us to grow faster and serve the customers better.
6. You have recently started to use the Shyft Instant Payments feature, what do you think about the initiative and how will it change the industry?
It has been working very well so far. I believe in any supply chain, the organization with the best borrowing power needs to deploy the working capital. This is the only way to ensure we deliver the best value in terms of quality and price to the end customers. I think Shyft is ahead of the game in our industry and it is a great initiative.
7. What does Ekomovers like about working with Shyft?
We love everything about Shyft. The growth, communication, focus on technology, attention to details and most importantly great team to work with.
8. Is there anything else you would like our blog readers to know about Ekomovers?
Yes, in addition to our focus on great service, we are environment nerds. We plant a tree for every move we do (we planted 3000+ trees last year), use recycled packing supplies, use biodiesel where available and various other environmentally friendly initiatives. We are also one of the most award winning moving companies in the US.
The pace of payments is clearly impacting the industry at large, and we believe that Shyft Instant Payments will see fast adoption amongst moving companies, and the system will become the industry standard - perhaps not immediately, because relocations is notoriously slow to change, but once the benefits become more evident, we will see a full migration from the existing systems.
Large and small corporations are well positioned to benefit from this migration by expanding and combining their instant capabilities with their solutions into an innovative portfolio of services.
