The association group's structures should be used when distributing Corona funding
In order to secure the liquidity of many thousands of affiliated companies in medium-sized retail, the trading cooperation ANWR Group calls for the group's existing structures to be used for the last mile of distribution of state Corona funding. Both the Association of the Shoe and Leather Goods Industry and the Cooperative Association support this proposal.
The ANWR Group thus joins the demand of “The Mittelstandsverbund – ZGV”, which had already brought this idea into play days ago. “We are able to quickly and easily get the state funding provided to where it is needed now,” says Frank Schuffelen, CEO of the ANWR Group. “To do this, it is necessary to provide the central regulators with a so-called “global loan” from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW).” This path is possible within the adopted laws.
The central and connecting element between trade, suppliers or industry and the association group is central regulation. Central settlement is a service in which the clearing of invoices and payments is handled for the industrial partners and trading companies of the respective associations. DZB Bank, which is part of the ANWR Group, guarantees the solvency of the trading companies and timely payments to suppliers and industrial partners.
With the help of a global loan, the ANWR Group could make available KfW funds available to dealers at short notice via DZB Bank. Other association groups outside of the ANWR Group have comparable systems with corresponding service agreements. The technical infrastructure of the association groups can be used immediately.
To this end, the state should assume 90 percent liability in favor of the group or the existing banking system that provides the liquidity, the group suggests. With such a step, the ANWR Group would be in a position to allow local retailers, some of whom are family-run, to defer the payment of their due goods invoices without a complex credit process and to conclude individually suitable repayment modalities following the crisis.
ANWR believes that this system works because the many thousands of connected retailers have been customers of DZB Bank for years. The requirements of the dealers are just as known as their economic circumstances. The dealers’ bank-relevant documents are available. The necessary liquidity can therefore be transported quickly by granting payment terms on supplier invoices. With the help of this solution, many thousands of jobs in retail and at often medium-sized suppliers could be saved via the ANWR Group and also the other association groups.
“We are the fourth generation to run a healthy and successful shoe business. Our sales completely collapsed from one day to the next. The store is full of current items from the spring/summer season that cannot be sold at the moment. The fixed costs continue and the postponed decades will have to be paid for at some point. We can only overcome this current crisis if we are given the opportunity to obtain additional liquidity very quickly. “It’s a matter of days, not weeks,” says Johannes Nölscher from Schuhhaus Kaufmann in Heilbronn.
“The ANWR Group, with its affiliated DZB Bank, has been a highly reliable partner to the shoe industry for years,” emphasizes Carl-August Seibel, Chairman of the Association of the Shoe and Leather Goods Industry (HDS/L). “The system behind it is predestined to bring federal funds quickly and safely into the fashion industry’s economic cycle. This liquidity will also reach the medium-sized shoe industry in a timely manner via the ANWR Group, where it is just as urgently needed to pay for the goods for the coming seasons.”
Frank Schuffelen is certain: “Liquidity must now be provided immediately and fed into the existing payment cycles immediately. This is the only way we can ensure that the “last mile” – i.e. medium-sized retail – remains integrated into the financial and economic cycle. In our opinion, the provision of funding exclusively via the state development bank system will take far too long. Even with the best efforts, bottlenecks arise that endanger the existence of a large number of trading companies.”
