Supply Chain Finance: Trends, Sustainability and Future Outlook

Supply Chain Finance (SCF) is a critical component of the global economy. It helps organizations manage their cash flow through their supply chain by offering early payment options to suppliers, while allowing buyers to extend payment terms.

The book is organized into three sections covering the history, current state, and predicted development of SCF. The first section sheds light on the development of SCF via historical data and stresses the importance of ensuring its sustainability. It discusses regional tendencies, illuminating the significance of sustainable practices within supply chain financing while showing the contrasts and similarities throughout global areas. The present state of SCF is explored in the second part, along with the difficulties and obstacles that businesses encounter when trying to set up and manage SCF. It explains why SCF may not be appropriate for all businesses by analyzing cash-to-cash characteristics and investigating factors impacting adoption. The third part deals with its forecasting. It reviews technologies like Blockchain in SCF, covering topics like smart contracts and the effects of Blockchain on management and operations. This part also evaluates the viability of upcoming technologies like Big Data Analytics and dives into the responsibilities of FinTech firms in SCF through the use of machine learning algorithms.

The book will be useful to students, professionals, and anyone else curious about the field.

Muhammad Irfan Khan is an Associate Professor in the Accounting and Finance Department, College of Business Management at Institute of Business Management, Pakistan. He has a MBA, M Phil and a PhD in Finance from Iqra University, Pakistan. He has 20 years of work experience in Academia and 6 years experience in the corporate sector. He has participated in numerous international research conferences as a presenter and Session Chair. Currently he is also a reviewer in various nationally recognized as well as International Impact Factor research journals. He has been a research supervisor for the theses of bachelor and master’s level students of corporate finance, corporate governance, development economics, etc. He has published several research papers in reputed journals. He also has published a book Development Financing and Economic Governance and several book chapters with internationally recognized publishers.

Syed Imran Zaman is an Associate Researcher at Sichuan Tourism University, China, and serves as an Associate Professor at Jinnah University for Women, Pakistan. He earned his Ph.D. in Business and Enterprise Management from Southwest Jiaotong University, China, where he later conducted postdoctoral research from 2019 to 2023. His research interests span green human resource management, sustainable supply chain management, consumer behavior, and digital transformation in business. Dr. Zaman’s doctoral dissertation contributed new insights to the comparative framework of consumer ethical decision-making in purchasing counterfeit luxury products across China and Pakistan, resulting in several publications in reputable journals indexed by ABS/SSCI. An accomplished scholar with international teaching experience in China and Pakistan, Dr. Zaman has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Knowledge Economy, Benchmarking: An International Journal, and Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics. He has contributed to multiple book chapters on supply chain management.

Sharfuddin Ahmed Khan has been an Assistant Professor in Industrial System Engineering at University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada since 2022. Prior to that, he has worked as Assistant Professor in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management department at University of Sharjah, UAE from 2019 to 2021 and lecturer in the same department from 2009 to 2019. He holds a PhD in Engineering (Industrial Engineering) from University of Quebec, Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ÉTS), Montreal, Canada in 2018, MSc in Industrial and Systems Engineering from National University of Singapore (NUS) Singapore in 2006, and Bachelors of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi Pakistan in 2004. He published more than 80 articles in reputed journals such as Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, International Journal of Production Research, Production Planning and Control, Knowledge Base System, Expert Systems with Application, Journal of Cleaner Production, Management Decisions, Technology in Society, Business Strategy and Environment, IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management, and Operations Management Research are some of them. In addition, he has five years of industrial experience in the field of supply chain management, warehouse management and inventory management at BASF Chemicals and ExxonMobil. His research interests include supply chain management, sustainability, supply chain mapping, circular economy, performance measurement & improvement and multi-criteria decision making.