The Tax Credit Marketplace powered by Workinvoice is born
Workinvoice, fintech of our ecosystem, by welcoming the new legislation has been able to create a new market in partnership with CRIF and PWC. We asked CEO Matteo Tarroni to tell us what it is all about.
The first platform to sell and buy tax credits is created. How does it work? Is it the first in Italy or in Europe?
The creation of a secondary market for entirely digital transferable tax credits and realized through a marketplace is certainly a novelty for Italy. We analyzed a couple of platforms in the USA, which have increased the liquidity of the State and Federal Tax Credits.
What is your role in the initiative?
Workinvoice creates digital infrastructures and designs the related processes that allow counterparties to buy and sell credits on a marketplace. In the case of the trade receivables market (operational from 2014), these are companies wanting to sell their invoices to specialized investment funds in order to anticipate their collection. In the case of this new platform, these are companies and banks wanting to sell their tax credits to other companies that want to reduce their tax burden.
A simple concept indeed, but one that requires an infrastructure that designs processes and implements them digitally and efficiently to provide marketplace members with the best user experience while containing operating costs and ultimately the sustainability of the marketplace itself, which must break even quicker. This is what Workinvoice does.
When was the collaboration with Crif born? And how did you work together?
We have been working together with the CRIF Group since 2018, with both its “souls”: the corporate (Cribis) and the financial institutions (CRIF). Since 2018 the Group has also entered the capital of Workinvoice developing the first real industrial partnership in fintech in Italy.
Together with them we developed this new idea, very focused on time-to-market as up to 4 months ago the Superecobonus did not even exist. For fiscal know-how we involved PWC as technical advisor.
With this platform a new market opens up, how do you expect it to evolve in the future?
The short-term objective is to give liquidity to the bonus provided by the Relaunch Decree. The possibility to monetize it quickly becomes a kind of “incentive to the incentive“. Afterwards we may see a financialisation of the marketplace when asset managers and financial institutions enter the marketplace, also keeping in mind the role of market makers. This is only the first asset that can be exchanged on the marketplace: others will follow. A new freely investable asset class will be created, as we have already done for trade receivables represented by invoices.
What are the benefits of this initiative for the end user?
On the marketplace operate companies and banks that have an interest in monetizing the credits on one side and on the other side companies that want to acquire the credits to offset the tax burden on all taxes paid through the F24 form (including withholding taxes on employee income).
For both sides of the market these are the main advantages and differences compared to off-market transactions:
- Continuous availability of tax credits: Users of the platform will be able to assess the possibility of buying and/or selling tax credits at any time.
- Advanced exchange mechanism: Thanks to its experience in the field of trade receivables, Workinvoice has an in-depth knowledge of transaction management mechanisms.
- Process compliance and certainty of credit: If the assignee of the credit has contributed to the violation of tax regulations, he is jointly and severally liable for the tax and sanctions shall be applied against him. It is therefore essential to demonstrate good faith, a circumstance that is difficult to decline in an absolutely new context such as that of the Superbonus. Thanks to the participation of PwC in the project for the creation of the platform, a set of procedures and documents to be kept to meet the need to demonstrate good faith has been prepared.
- Economic efficiency: The platform is based on a matching mechanism between supply and demand that eliminates potential market inefficiencies and lowers the commission level of the service (also thanks to the digitization of the end to end process).
- Speed: The entire process of buying and selling and online compliance checks guarantees shorter timescales compared to the most common offline processes. This will allow the assignees to also cover also the portion of taxes that cannot be estimated at the beginning of the year and for which the time window between the identification of the tax debt and the date of payment is narrower.
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