What does this mean for growers and buyers?
All direct transactions at the Royal FloraHolland marketplace will soon be made digitally only. 100% Digital will increase the efficiency of both the supply and the demand and will help us as an industry to comply with the tightened financial laws in Europe. 100% Digital brings opportunities and reduces the risk of errors, for example. With the entire industry, we are taking the next step towards digitization.
Are you a grower? Then we expect that your entire stock will be available online on Floriday. Are you a buyer? Then you will place your order on this online stock. For both growers as well as buyerss the following applies: it can be done through a connection with Floriday from your own software package or directly through Floriday.
The deadline for 100% Digital of 31 March 2021 has been postponed. After consultation with parties in the sector, we at Royal FloraHolland have concluded that the speed at which we want to realise 100% Digital is excessively ambitious. We have also discovered that certain functionalities needed to be able to trade completely digitally are missing in Floriday. The need to further digitise does however remain and Floriday as a platform is widely supported by the sector. In order to fully support trade between growers and buyers through Floriday, a push back of the deadline is inevitable. In the coming weeks, we will discuss the follow-up approach for the roll-out of 100% Digital with various parties in the market. Based on these discussions, we will inform growers, buyers, agents and software suppliers by the end of March at the latest what this means in concrete terms. For the time being, there will be no changes to the leniency scheme and you can continue to trade as you are now.
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For growers, this means that their supply has to be available online on Floriday by the end of 2020. For buyers, it means that they will place all orders through the digital platforms FloraMondo, FloraXchange and Blueroots. Both growers and buyers can do so via a link in their own software or via the digital system provided by Royal FloraHolland. In practice, this means that the Connect-EAB will be discontinued in the future.
PSD2 stands for Payment Services Directive 2. Or in Dutch, '2e betaaldienstrichtlijn'. The first PSD guideline dates from 2007. These guidelines resulted in an exception being made for trade platforms and marketplaces, such as Royal FloraHolland.
PSD2 came into force in the Netherlands in early 2019, which meant that the aforementioned exception was abolished and the requirements for companies providing payment services were tightened up. Royal FloraHolland was aware of PSD2 early on, but the exact Dutch interpretation of this European directive only became clear at the beginning of 2019. In consultation with legal experts and De Nederlandse Bank, the possibilities of qualifying for the so-called ‘commercial agent exception’ were examined.
The implementation of the terms and conditions of the commercial agent for the direct flow requires an adjustment of the transaction creation. Royal FloraHolland already operates as a commercial agent in the clock (auction) process. This is also the case for direct trade, provided that the commercial transactions for direct flows are actually carried out via Floriday.
Royal FloraHolland chose to start the digitisation process and to prepare for the future in 2016. Floriday was launched in 2017. These days, the Floriday environment and its digital channels are so mature that we are going to take the next step towards 100% digital. Royal FloraHolland is convinced that the sector will benefit greatly from the digitisation move and that it will present new opportunities for transactions to take place. In addition to the benefits for the sector, it is important to continue to comply with the tightened European laws and regulations (PSD2).
These agreements also have to be recorded in Floriday and buyers have to place their orders using these supply lines. This does not mean that these Excel files are no longer allowed, but the result of the negotiation (the fixed agreement) will also have to be recorded in Floriday and orders must then be placed via this platform.
There will be a tool that allows buyers to respond quickly to offers from growers. The grower can create make a 'short-term customer-specific offer' within Floriday (or via the API). This customer-specific offer describes the product, the prices and the delivery conditions. The buyer will then receive a phone notification from or via Floriday of the customer-specific offer made by the grower. The buyer then has the option to order from the customer-specific offer. The buyer also has the option to add his own order reference so that the invoice review on his side will run more smoothly (as is the case with regular supply).
This does not mean that “the buyer can then buy the entire offer at the 'push of a button’”. This would imply that there was prior contact between the grower and customer regarding an agreed upon deal.
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