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Coupa wanted a partner to provide global digital payment capabilities for their Coupa Pay platform.
About Coupa
Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. Coupa empowers you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins. Coupa is the margin multiplier company™.
Learn more at coupa.com and follow Coupa on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
From Sourcing Globally to Paying Globally
Coupa has established itself as the world’s leading solution for businesses sourcing goods and services on a global scale, boasting an unrivaled dataset of global suppliers at customers' fingertips.
This innovative platform not only connects a community of buyers but also enables them to achieve economies of scale that were previously unattainable, resulting in substantial savings in both costs and administrative time.
However, despite these advancements, a critical gap still remained in 2018: the inability to process supplier payments within the Coupa ecosystem. This missing link presented an opportunity for Coupa to enhance its offering and further streamline the procurement process for its customers.
"There's a common pain point businesses face when making B2B payments" said John Petersson, Vice President Coupa Pay Customer Success. “If you need to manually connect your invoices and your payments together via your banking and ERP platforms, there’s a big disconnect in the data. This causes all sorts of problems related to lack of visibility and control.”
Coupa wanted to bridge that disconnect, so they decided to build Coupa Pay. It acts as the payment part of the Coupa product suite.
“Coupa Pay connects your invoices to your payments, with all the data connected,” continued John. “It provides one place to view, control, and make payments, increasing efficiency and enhancing visibility across all of your spend, payments, and liquidity. Everything happens in a unified environment, and your suppliers can access it too.”
A core component required to build Coupa Pay was the payment infrastructure it would run on. With such a diverse, globally located customer base, the payment infrastructure needed to match that scale, and it was an infrastructure Coupa wasn’t looking to build on their own.
“We didn’t want to become a money transmitter ourselves, so we decided to go the partnership route,” said John. “We were looking for a partner that could cover the needs of our customers. And our typical customer will have locations, employees, and suppliers based in multiple territories, and need to make payments to them all. They could have bank accounts in 10 different countries, and be making supplier payments to 30, 40, 50 different countries.”
They needed a global proprietary network that pays out in multiple currencies and is safe and secure.
“We wanted to enable our customers to pay their suppliers using the payment method/s they chose,” said John. “One was a way for our customers to make bank transfer payments - what we call ‘digital payments’. For the digital payments piece, we found TransferMate,” said John.
The breadth of coverage offered by Transfermate along with the seamless payment experience meant that all the elements required for the solution were available from the beginning to build the solution.
A Global Payment Partner
Coupa's approach to building the platform focused on designing the ideal customer experience first, with the TransferMate team then embedding their capabilities into that solution. This required a close collaboration between the product and engineering teams of both partners.
“It was a process of us designing our product, and then working with TransferMate to figure out how we would deliver the solution – essentially how the payment works,” said John. “So, the capabilities of TransferMate were reflected in the product, which resulted in a better product. It was a very close partnership, and we built a very tight solution that has scaled tremendously.”
The payments infrastructure Coupa embedded is the biggest fintech payments infrastructure in the world. It was built with regulation and compliance at its core, and the technical capacity for partners to leverage it without major obstacles.
“TransferMate has one of the broadest regulatory footprints around, and very importantly, compared to the alternatives, they were easy to work with,” said John. “We wanted a partner that had the regulatory footprint, the technology, and the team to make it work, and the working relationship that allowed us to build a great solution and then keep improving it.”
The core asset TransferMate brings to Coupa Pay is that global infrastructure. It allows customers to pay out in more than 140 currencies across the world while connecting those payments to their local bank accounts – all within Coupa Pay.
“The ability for our customers to initiate their payments from one platform, but debiting their various bank accounts in various countries, that's a big benefit,” said John. “Before, they’d have to make payments from multiple systems based on the account they’re making the payment from – and they might have bank accounts in dozens of countries – but now they can make them all within the Coupa platform using Coupa Pay.”
TransferMate’s network made these cross-border payments as efficient as local ones. By acquiring licenses to operate in individual countries before combining them into a unified global network, payments travel across the world like a domestic payment.
“Our customers can pay their global suppliers using local transfers, all within a single platform. For those technical people, this means accessing payment systems like BACS in the UK, SEPA in the eurozone, and ACH in the US, no matter where you are operating from,” said John. “And those payments are more efficient and lower cost for both the sender and the receiver compared to cross-border Swift payments.”
Coupa Pay customers use TransferMate’s infrastructure every time they make a digital payment, but for them, it all happens within Coupa.
“The customers don’t ever have to interact with TransferMate; the capabilities are all embedded within Coupa Pay” concluded John.
A Complete Payment Solution
Coupa Pay launched in 2018 with TransferMate facilitating the digital payments part of the platform. Last year, TransferMate processed billions in bank transfer payments for hundreds of Coupa Pay customers originating from dozens of countries and going to over 100 different destination countries.
Most importantly, Coupa Pay customers can now connect their payments, invoices, and suppliers, all within a single platform.
“I would say we've developed a payment solution that is unique in the market and one that our customers really appreciate and love,” said John. “I've been in the B2B payment space for 25 years, but I've never come across customers that are so excited about using a platform. It's really amazing.”
Customers no longer have to upload and download data from different banking platforms and manually reconcile them, creating a complete and streamlined procure-to-pay process. On the supplier side, they are automatically notified when payments are made, can see the status of payments, and know when they are being paid.
“If you're using the same platform for your invoices and your payments, and you let the suppliers access that platform as well, then you have a very strong solution,” said John. “If suppliers have any questions around their expected payment, they just go to the platform, and they can figure it out. It solves a lot of issues that pop up.”
The partnership did not stop at launch. Coupa releases three product updates annually, with TransferMate part of the process of iterative improvements.
“For each release, we typically have features included that we developed based on TransferMate functionality and together in collaboration with the TransferMate team. We test each improvement internally, roll it out to a few customers, and then to the broader group,” said John.
The Final Word
“Embedding TransferMate’s global payment capabilities within Coupa Pay means customers are now spending smarter and paying smarter. It’s a partnership that’s delivered real and lasting benefits for our customers.”
- John Petersson, Vice President Coupa Pay Customer Success
Discover more about Coupa Pay and how it will help your organisation to spend smarter, pay smarter, and manage liquidity smarter.
