Network-based Receivable Financing

Receivable financing -- the process whereby cash is advanced to firms against receivables their customers have yet to pay -- is a well-established funding source for businesses. In this paper we present a novel, collaborative approach to receivable financing: unlike existing centralized approaches where the financing company acts as a server handling each request individually, our approach employs a network perspective where money flow is triggered among customers themselves. The main contribution of this work is to provide a principled formulation of the network-based receivable-settlement strategy, and show how all algorithmic challenges posed by the design of this strategy are achieved in practice. Extensive experiments on real receivable data attest the effectiveness of the proposed methods.