Introducing the C2FO Payment Terms Index

An Upstream Signal of Global Liquidity

APRIL | 2026

C2FO operates the world’s largest B2B platform for working capital. Since our founding, we have captured over $14 trillion in transactions. The C2FO Payment Terms Index transforms this data from over 500 million unique invoices annually across 180

countries and territories into actionable financial intelligence.

The C2FO Payment Terms Index

Executive Summary

In the world of finance, most analysis depends on quarterly disclosures, limited bank settlement data or qualitative surveys. But these are lagging indicators with often limited applicability. Conversely, payment terms and trade credit between buyers and sellers in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace offer a timely indicator from which to glean macroeconomic insights.

Payment terms tied to working capital are the largest unmonitored source of short-term financing in the global economy. At C2FO, we operate the world’s on-demand working capital marketplace, which sits directly between buyers and suppliers. Our proprietary data set constitutes the largest data set of overall payment terms and captures trillions of dollars in transactions. Unlike standard supply chain finance programs that rely on static cohorts and fixed rates, the marketplace model reveals the actual behavioral preference for liquidity across millions of invoices. It can provide a measure of market stress that other data cannot replicate.

We have developed a proprietary index to measure this, the Payment Terms Index. It tracks the evolution of payment terms across the global B2B landscape. Our aggregate data offer observations on payment trends that match the broader economic cycle, and the index constitutes an important indicator tracking supply chain and B2B liquidity. This provides insight into expected business outcomes.

We’ll outline these observations in the pages ahead, and we intend to publish regular updates.

At a high level:

• Interest-rate regimes matter when it comes to terms of payment.
• Supply-chain disruptions also impact payment terms.
• The size of business reflects the need for payment liquidity.
• C2FO’s data can break down payment trends at a regional, sector and industry level.
• The direction of payment trends can serve as an indicator for the direction of the economy, credit conditions, liquidity and the banking system.

The C2FO Payment Terms Index

The C2FO Payment Index is a standing measurement of a system that has never been mapped at scale.

The Vital Importance of Trade Credit

Simply put, the economy would not function without trade credit – suppliers providing financing to buyers. It is the largest single source of global financing to firms. And because suppliers can extend credit to buyers and discount receivables in the banking system, a multiplier effect exists within the economy’s overall credit framework. As such, liquidity (or lack thereof) within the trade credit system can affect the broader global economy.

Trade credit contributes to economic growth by expanding working capital for businesses. Without it, firms would have to rely on outside financing from banks and other financial institutions for all aspects of production. That’s costly, time-consuming and often unavailable to smaller firms.

Trade credit, which also fills the financing gap when banks hesitate to lend, keeps companies from having to maintain massive cash reserves to pay suppliers immediately. This allows them to use capital for other purposes. The global market for trade credit—the sum of accounts payable and receivable—is estimated at $40 trillion, making this 'invisible' financing source roughly equal in size to the entire public corporate bond market.

The Payment Terms Index – An Overview

While traditional economic indicators often rely on lagging sentiment surveys or quarterly balance sheet filings, the C2FO Payment Terms Index provides a high-frequency view of global liquidity. By monitoring hundreds of millions of actual invoices and trillions of dollars in transactions, the index tracks the effective length and evolution of trade credit through verified, invoice-level behavior rather than stated or "official" terms.

To ensure the index reflects genuine behavioral shifts rather than changes in the supplier population, the analysis is limited to a stable cohort of firms active on the C2FO platform for at least five years. We utilize 12-month rolling averages to smooth seasonality, establishing a baseline value of 100 in January 2020, the final month of pre- pandemic payment behavior.

Values above 100: Values below 100:

Indicate payment-term expansion, signaling that Indicate term contraction, often reflecting a buyers are deferring payments to preserve cash. prioritization of liquidity in response to rising interest rates or credit tightening.

C2FO’s Data Scale:

The scale of the C2FO platform offers a unique perspective on the global economy. Processing over 50 million unique invoices daily, the platform spans 180 countries and territories and every major industry classification. This is not an estimate; it is verified transaction data captured at the point of execution.

The index leverages the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to provide granular visibility down to the 6-digit industry level. This inaugural report focuses on the headline index and three structurally significant sectors:

• Material & Chemical Products (NAICS 32).

• Industrial & Technology Equipment (NAICS 33).

• Wholesale Trade (NAICS 42).

Identifying Economic Signals

By measuring the duration and direction of trade credit, the index surfaces three critical signals:

• Effective Term Lengths: Tracking the real duration of credit across specific geographies and firm sizes.

• Directional Shifts: Providing a real-time read on how quickly the working capital burden is shifting across supply chains.

• Structural Divergence: Identifying how liquidity risk is unevenly distributed between enterprise-scale businesses, mid-market firms, and small businesses—dynamics that aggregate indices often obscure.

500M+

Unique invoices processed annually across 180 countries and territories

1,000+

NAICS industry codes with active coverage, from 2-digit to 6-digit

Structural Shifts & the “New Normal”

When uncertainty hit in early 2020, buyers faced cash risk of undefined duration and severity. The fastest available lever, one requiring no bank negotiation, no contract amendment, no externally visible signal of stress, was to extend payment terms. It was used rapidly and at scale.

The index shows terms lengthening sharply through 2020 and into 2021 (Figure 1), reaching a peak in May 2021 as economic reopening collided with severe supply chain pressure. Large suppliers absorbed the shift: preserving buyer relationships took priority, and the implicit assumption, broadly borne out, was that larger suppliers had the capital market access to manage the burden. This shift in payment terms marked a structural change in global finance.

The Payment Terms Index is Nine Index Points Above the Baseline and Pre-Pandemic Levels Figure 1 C2FO Payment Terms Index (Aggregate) | Monthly, Jan 2020 – Jan 2026

What the data reveals most clearly is that the post-COVID normalization in payment terms has been incomplete. Terms moderated from their 2021 peak but have not returned to pre-2020 levels for large suppliers, a trend clearly illustrated by the sustained elevation in Figure 1. The working capital burden that shifted toward enterprise-scale suppliers in 2020 has become, in significant part, a structural feature of the post-pandemic corporate landscape.

Divergence by Firm Size: A Structural Finding

One of the most analytically significant results in the data is the divergence in payment term behavior by supplier size. Smaller suppliers have seen terms shorten since 2022, while enterprise-scale suppliers have seen terms remain elevated or, in some periods, continue extending. The implicit logic — that large suppliers can absorb the burden, while extending terms aggressively to small suppliers risks rendering them insolvent — is being acted on, at scale, across industries, as visualized in Figure 2.

This is not merely a commercial observation. It has direct implications for credit analysis: the enterprise suppliers carrying the largest working capital burden are often the same firms whose balance sheet strength makes that burden less visible in conventional credit metrics. The index surfaces that structural loading in a way that accounts payable and receivable data, reported quarterly and in aggregate, cannot.

Figure 2Enterprise Suppliers Have Seen the Greatest Change in Payment Terms C2FO Payment Terms Index by Organization Size | Jan 2026

Enterprise suppliers may be using terms acceptance as a way to maintain price or gain market share. Working capital risk was transferred onto the largest suppliers in the immediate post-COVID period, where it has remained. Smaller companies were largely spared what would have been a significant balance sheet burden. Source: C2FO proprietary network intelligence, 2020-2026.

The index is most valuable not as a description of what has happened, but as a

continuous signal about what is building

Divergence by Geography: Regional Liquidity Shifts

While firm size is a primary driver of trade credit divergence, geography creates a second layer of variance. As shown in Figure 3, payment term dynamics in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific reflect differing regional liquidity pressures and monetary environments.

Figure 3The Global Structural Shift in Payment Terms is Largely an American Phenomenon C2FO Payment Terms Index by Region | Jan 2026

The regional picture tells three distinct stories. The Americas drove the global trend, surging to 112 by mid-2021 and remaining structurally elevated ever since. In EMEA, terms expanded modestly post- COVID before steadily compressing back below baseline, now sitting around 98. In APAC, the index has declined persistently to 90 by early 2026, suggesting terms have actively shortened rather than merely stabilized. What looks like a global structural shift is, in practice, a predominantly American one. Source: C2FO proprietary network intelligence, 2020-2026.

When conditions deteriorate, the question everyone is asking is: where is the stress building? This index is one of the places you look.

The Rate Cycle

From 2022, the index has captured the effects of the Federal Reserve’s rate-hiking cycle with notable clarity, showing the shortening of terms as seen in Figure 1. Terms contracted as the cost of capital rose, and corporate treasuries on both sides of buyer-supplier relationships prioritized liquidity.

The C2FO Payment Terms Index

Conclusion

C2FO’s Payment Terms Index reveals that trade credit is a dynamic indicator of economic stress and liquidity distribution. For finance and treasury professionals, credit analysts and policy makers, the index provides an aggregate look at movements in trade credit and how they can inform developments in the broader global finance landscape. It reflects a real-time dataset and insight unavailable elsewhere in the financial marketplace. B2B buyers and suppliers can benefit from the insight this index and our data set can elicit, as can analysts seeking a better indicator of conditions in the global credit environment.