Bankinter advances payment to all its vendors in up to 15 days in order to minimise any financial impact they suffer due to coronavirus

Bankinter is taking further action in its shock plan to help households and businesses to assuage the impacts of the unprecedented situation caused by COVID-19 on their finances. The bank has agreed to pay all its vendors early, within a maximum time frame of 15 days, five days earlier than the current average payment period of 20 days.

The bank is making it possible for the businesses and professionals providing it with services and products to collect payment earlier than planned and increase their liquidity in this unprecedented situation caused by coronavirus in Spain.

To implement this measure, Bankinter has already adapted its payment procedure in order to help its partners’ the finances as much as possible. For some time, the bank has had environmental, social and good governance standards (‘ASG’, in Spanish) for selecting and approving its vendors.

In 2019, it paid a total of 646.1 million euros to its vendors. Furthermore, the bank already reduced its average payment period by almost two days in comparison with 2018.

Shock plan.

This measure adds to others already taken by Bankinter as part of its shock plan. The latest measure was to allow for payment holidays on mortgage principal payments for any customer households that could not meet the mortgage moratorium requirements set out in the Royal Decree-Law of extraordinary measures of 17 March. Households will, thus, play a smaller monthly instalment on their mortgage, from which the amount corresponding to their principal will be subtracted for a period of up to four months. This may reduce their amount significantly.

This payment holiday on the principal may be extended to up to 12 months where necessary. Beneficiaries of this principal repayment deferral should be unemployed as a result of the current situation or affected by a temporary redundancy scheme. Professionals, sole traders and employees whose operations have been shut down by the decree of emergency measures will also be benefited.

Furthermore, the bank will pay customers’ pension plans five days early in order to help families in need with their finances.

Also, to help businesses and sole traders with their finances, the bank has approved measures such as immediately activating the line of guarantees secured by the State, the first tranche of 20 billion euros was approved on Tuesday by the Council of Ministers. This comes on top of payment holidays on loans for certain customers or reverse factoring post-financing, in addition to grace periods and term extensions on leases for SMEs and sole traders. It is also giving companies the option of using pre-approved loans (intended for tax and social security payments) for any other purpose, in addition to increasing or reusing unused limits of the ‘multi-line financing’ product, with which all financing needs can be combined into a single credit line.