This actually has got a name in treasury circles: it's called "reverse factoring". One of the very nice side effects is that when you're a big publicly traded company, you can generally afford to set up a dedicated entity to handle this business, which gets to be considered a financial entity by IFRS reporting standards, which (through a complex reasoning I won't bother you with) magically enhance your operating cash flow - one of the more important reporting metrics when you're not actually not a bank but e.g a retailer.