Grupo Empresarial Argos implements a sustainable confirming line with BBVA to support its suppliers

• This initiative will benefit more than 7,500 micro, small and medium Colombian companies.
• About 84% of the 9,000 suppliers of Grupo Empresarial Argos in Colombia are MSMEs, a sector particularly affected by the pandemic.
• This line of benefits built with BBVA is part of the Creamos Valor Social program that Grupo Empresarial Argos launched to promote economic reactivation by supporting its suppliers, generating employment and with programs of social impact.

Grupo Argos and its companies, Cementos Argos, Celsia and Odinsa, designed a sustainable confirming line for their suppliers in alliance with BBVA, which will allow suppliers to discount their invoices, improving their cash flow to face 2021 with greater flexibility .

With this project, a financial instrument with more diverse options is made available to suppliers that better suit their needs, since it allows them to have working capital to operate, meet their financial obligations and access the benefits of banking. . Around 84% of the Grupo Empresarial’s suppliers in Colombia are part of the MSMEs segment, which generate employment for more than 110,000 Colombians.

“We are pleased to have been able to structure a mechanism with BBVA to ensure liquidity and better financing costs for our more than 9,000 small and medium-sized suppliers of Grupo Empresarial Argos. This is an initiative to strengthen the business fabric, which in turn will be reflected in better possibilities for growth and employment ”.

Jorge Mario Velásquez – Chairman of Grupo Argos

“This line of sustainable confirming that we announced with Grupo Argos constitutes a very important milestone at BBVA, since it allows us to link a large Colombian business group with sustainability commitments towards its suppliers. Sustainable confirming is the best way to reaffirm our commitment to small and medium-sized companies and thus seek the preservation and generation of employment, as well as the development of sustainable practices ”.

Mario Pardo – Executive Chairman of BBVA

This benefit is in addition to the financial solutions that the Argos Business Group has developed to promote the country’s economic reactivation process and which included the announcement of the early adoption of the Fair Payment Law, as it had been doing since the second semester of 2020.

For its part, BBVA, within the framework of its climate change and sustainable development strategy to contribute to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and aligned with the Paris Agreement on Climate, has committed to placing 100,000 million euros in green financing, sustainable infrastructure, social entrepreneurship and financial inclusion. At the end of 2020, the bank reported that it reached 50% of this objective, by mobilizing 50,154 million euros in sustainable financing.