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Interestingly, Medieval Iceland had a polycentric legal system where you could sell the wrong done to you to someone who had more money to prosecute. There's a

• joshuaissac 5y ago
  That sounds similar to creditors selling the right to collect debt repayments to a debt collector, or patent holders selling their patents to a patent enforcement company or patent troll (usually the same).
  • stef25 5y ago
    Here in Belgium there's a platform on which you can sell invoices that have say a 90 day payment term to someone who'll give you say 95% of it, if you need that money immediately. They then get the full invoice after 90 days.
    • seanhunter 5y ago
      That's a very common form of trade finance worldwide, and is usually called "invoice discounting" or "receivables factoring" https://tradefinanceanalytics.com/what-is-factoring https://tradefinanceanalytics.com/what-is-factoring
      • denton-scratch 5y ago
        For an overdue bill, the factor is called a debt collector. But it's roughly the same business.
      • Fnoord 5y ago
        There's collection agencies with no cure no pay (who add up their own fee upon the debt), and there's debt traders who buy a debt for a lower price and who then harass the person who (allegedly!) owes the money. Its a scoundrel market, IMO. Heartless, Ellisonish. County court bailiff (gerechtsdeurwaarder) is a government variant which has legal merit (unlike the other 2). Still, doesn't mean they are morally right (and those in debt have a harder time to defend themselves, legally), but at least it does have that legal merit. The problem is that, yes, often people who are in debt are in the wrong and should pay it, but there's all these corner cases and cases where the debt is incorrect, its an underlying dispute, it was started because of bad communication, etc (been there, done it).
        • NoboruWataya 5y ago
          I don't think that's what the parent comment is talking about. It's talking about selling non-defaulted invoices as, essentially, a form of secured financing for the vendor company. The invoices are highly likely to get paid in the ordinary course and usually the company selling them even continues to "service" them, ie, to liaise with the underlying customer and receive payment. It's a very different business to debt collection.
    • phillc73 5y ago
      I had a small business once with a few large outstanding invoices. These were owed to us (small company) by a very large organisation. Our payment terms were 30 days and the invoices were now out to 120 days. We were hurting very badly, but had pretty much no leverage over the very large organisation to make them pay - we weren't the only game in town and they could just take their business elsewhere. Anyway, we investigated factoring of the invoices and we certainly weren't offered 95%!! This was probably 10 years ago now, but I recall we would only received something like 70% of the total invoice value. I thought it was a real rort.
      • NoboruWataya 5y ago
        From the circumstances you were describing I'm surprised you were even offered 70%, as it sounds like there was a significant risk those invoices would not get paid. The 95% (or there abouts) is for invoices that will almost certainly be paid on time. Defaulting debts are often sold for cents on the dollar.
• ruined 5y ago
  >legal system where you could sell the wrong done to you to someone who had more money to prosecute. and now we just have contingency