ASOCOLFLORES & AgroCheck

BOGOTÁ, Colombia: ASOCOLFLORES, The Association of Colombian Flower Exporters, and AgroCheck, credit information supplier and international debt collection agency for the floriculture industry, recently started an exclusive partnership to improve the debt monitoring for Colombian flower exporters.

The arrangement will be an important advance for the Colombian flower producers and their portfolio. Having the credit information of new potentials clients is key to achieving secure transactions and avoiding losses in the business. It is also important to remark the service of debt collection offered, Flower´s exporters can secure their business, increase utilities and strengthen the whole model of exportations. During the meeting both ASOCOLFLORES and AgroCheck were convinced that a partnership was the best solution.

“Last May I visited Bogotá and Rionegro to discuss about the problems Colombian farms have with non-paying clients and to give a presentation how to improve this”, says Mark Weitjens, director of AgroCheck. “The last three years we noticed that more and more South-American farms became the victim of doubtful debtors. In a lot of cases these were debtors we already known in our database for years with a negative history. Some of them did business with Dutch flower exporters, leaving big debts behind, and starting all over again with a new business entity. A lot of companies in Holland know these debtors now so they start buying flowers in South-America, because nobody knows their history there. But, we are there to help them and I’m sure we will! A simple check in our database can tell if there is positive or negative history known about a debtor and if we don’t know the debtor, we can create an up-to-date credit report.”

For AgroCheck this is a great opportunity, Mark explains: “For two years we have several clients from South-America, but the growth was not that big. By working together with ASOCOLFLORES, we can reach a huge market in Colombia and we can prevent their affiliates to do business with doubtful debtors. And this is just the beginning, we aim to create a complete international database for companies in some of the most important flower producing countries: Holland, Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya. They all supply flowers to the same clients in many different countries. If a supplier has a problem with a client and sends this information to AgroCheck, they can warn other suppliers. One time you are helping other suppliers and the next time it’s the other way around.”

“We, as ASOCOLFLORES, believe that the partnership between our Association and AgroCheck will make the whole exportation model of flowers safer. We hope most of our members take advantage of this opportunity and start creating and trustable way of make international transactions said Augusto Solano”, President of ASOCOLFLORES.

For more information: www.asocolflores.org  and www.agro-check.nl/en.