The Factoring or Trade Credit Insurance Dilemma

Authors:

Pages: 221-235

Abstract:

Both factoring and trade credit insurance are widely used tools for managing trade receivables risk. Although sharing certain similarities, they are fundamentally different—factoring is a form of financing, whereas trade credit insurance is a kind of insuring. The reasons for choosing a factoring contract or a trade credit insurance policy vary, as do their respective benefits. Despite the extensive discussion of receivables management in financial literature, businesses continue to face challenges in collecting payments from customers. In Bulgaria, practices for mitigating the risk of non-paying clients remain underutilized and insufficiently understood. This study aims to highlight the differences between factoring and trade credit insurance, to compare their costs, and to assess their advantages and disadvantages. The findings indicate that while trade credit insurance can be used independently to protect suppliers against credit risk, factoring is inherently linked to insurance, making the two instruments complementary rather than interchangeable.

Keywords:

factoring; trade credit insurance; non-payment risk.

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