Overdues in the Middle East jump 58%: how to protect working capital now

Signals you can’t ignore

A recent Atradius report shows a tough picture for B2B in the Middle East. On-time payments fell 34%. Overdues rose 58%. Bad debt climbed 9%. This pressure is not only regional. It reflects a global squeeze on the order to cash cycle. In this climate, reactive credit management proves too slow and too costly. What should be routine starts to threaten cash flow and, in the worst case, survival.

When days turn into dollars

The cost of delay hides in Accounts Receivable. Use one simple lens:

Average Accounts Receivable = (DSO × Annual Credit Sales) / 365

If your annual credit sales are $10 million and your DSO is 45 days, about $1.2 million sits in unpaid invoices at any time. At a 6% cost of capital you spend more than $73,000 a year

to carry that balance. Slip five days and you lose about $8,000 more each year. Every day matters.

Friction that slows the money

Delays often start with avoidable friction. Impersonal reminders create stress and silence. Manual steps trigger disputes. Simple payment failures go unretried. Customers who want to pay face extra work. You feel it directly on margin.

From reactive to reliable

The fix is to make credit management intelligent, automated, and customer centric.

• End-to-end automation removes rekeying and routing errors. It cuts operating effort by up to 40% and speeds resolution.

• Personalized, empathetic outreach replaces generic demands. Recovery improves by 10–20% because customers see a clear next step.

• Smart payment retries rescue soft declines. Recovery can rise from an industry median near 30% to 60%+ when you retry at the right time with the right method.

• Predictive analytics and flexible incentives guide who to contact, when to escalate, and what offer to make. Workflows keep actions moving without handoffs or guesswork.

Read more about how these tools can effectively be combined here.