Hi Scott, welcome to our Fintech Interview Series. Please tell us about your tech journey so far. How did you get into financial technology in the first place?
I found my way into financial technology through a series of diverse roles and experiences throughout my career. I started in management consulting at Ernst & Young, where for eight years I focused on business transformation and ERP deployment in the fintech-oriented space for SAP, Coca Cola, Metlife, EY, Morgan Stanley and a number of other Fortune 500 clients. Then at the front end of the .com boom, I embarked on a new path running operations for e-business integrator Proxicom. The core of our business was building websites and e-commerce capabilities for the likes of Goldman Sachs, and AOL during the web boom.
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Upon the proverbial “Bubble” bursting, Proxicom was acquired by Dimension Data, a leading systems integrator and one of Cisco Systems largest resellers and integrators globally.
I spent the next 17 years focused on corporate network infrastructure and solutions (network, unified communications, security, data center, cloud), eventually becoming the COO for the Americas region and the president of the North American market. I had the opportunity to be a part of Dimension Data’s transition into cloud services, significantly contributing to the company’s growth. We served some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including HSBC, which became one of our largest customers.
With the emergence of SaaS, I was ready for a career transition and took on the role of chief operating officer at Granicus, a government technology and citizen engagement company backed by Vista Private Equity and Harvest Partners. During my tenure, the company experienced substantial growth, with revenue increasing tenfold.
In 2021, when SpendHQ approached me for the CEO position, I considered three key factors before joining its team:
(1) belief in the product, Spend Intelligence,
(2) confidence in the team’s capabilities, and
(3) the potential to bring operational maturity and accelerated growth to their emerging software business.
SpendHQ, at that time, was a business unit of Insight Sourcing Group, a leading procurement consulting firm, and had not been run by a full-time CEO. The opportunity was a great fit for my skill sets and passion for helping scale and grow companies, so I jumped at the chance and took the job.
Now as the CEO of SpendHQ, I bring my twenty-six years of experience in delivering results, leading organizational change and transformation, and managing complex business operations to drive the company forward in the fintech and procuretech spaces.
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My goal is to inspire teams to deliver exceptional results and continue building a successful and innovative software business.
Please tell us a little bit about the services provided by SpendHQ.
We view ourselves as upstream, not downstream, in the procurement value chain. We close a longstanding gap between spend insights, procurement strategy, and execution.
For far too long, there wasn’t a unified platform available that delivers spend insights, ingests them into a pipeline, establishes projects, and enables the management, tracking, and execution of those opportunities to deliver bottom-line savings or advance other corporate strategic ESG goals such as diversity or carbon reduction.
That is exactly what we set out to do – and are doing – at SpendHQ.
We elevate the impact that procurement teams of over 450 customers have on corporate objectives. Here’s how:
Spend Visibility:
We help our customers globally gain a comprehensive understanding of their spending patterns by providing detailed intelligence into where with whom, and when they spend. We ingest all of their spend data, not just their P2P data, but all sources, and utilize our AI/ML engine to normalize and categorize the spend into a procurement-focused taxonomy.
By analyzing the spend data, we help customers uncover crucial information about suppliers, categories, and purchasing trends, enabling organizations to make informed sourcing and procurement decisions and identify potential areas to drive savings or advance other corporate goals such as enhancing their spend with diverse suppliers.
Spend Insights:
We go beyond providing simple spend data. Our advanced analytics capabilities enable us to extract meaningful spend intelligence from the vast amount of procurement data collected. We apply data modeling, predictive analytics, and AI/machine learning techniques to uncover hidden patterns, identify cost-saving opportunities, and support strategic decision-making.
Procurement Performance Management:
Our solution provides customers with the tools and resources they need to measure, track, report, and improve their procurement performance. By centralizing procurement performance projects, with financial and non-financial goals, establishing key performance indicators, and leveraging real-time data, organizations can effectively evaluate their progress, identify areas of underperformance, and implement targeted strategies to enhance procurement performance.
Said another way, you would never run a sales team without Salesforce or a CRM to track and manage sales opportunities. That is the gap our Procurement Performance Management solution fills; a platform for procurement teams to manage and report on the opportunities they are executing to drive savings and corporate objectives.
How do you see emerging tech play a key role in how newer fintech innovations are built/developed?
Artificial intelligence is disrupting and will continue to disrupt the fintech solutions market for the foreseeable future. AI will be transformative to generating insights and looking at organizations’ data via a private generative AI model. Utilizing AI, we’re able to look across the $7 trillion in spend that we have analyzed to build benchmarks and use that benchmarking data to drive improvements to enterprise spend behaviors and execute on savings opportunities.
Another thing to consider: customer centricity, ease of design, and ultimately ease of use will win in this market. Thus, we at SpendHQ have an opportunity to provide the easiest, most intuitive spend intelligence and PPM software in this space.
As a fintech/procuretech provider, we touch every business segment, because fintech/procuretech touches every business segment. We work across all industries and all sizes of enterprises as evidenced by our 450 enterprise customers. Whether heavy in indirect spend or both direct and indirect, our solution is a great fit for those enterprises that truly want to understand their enterprise spend and then act on the insights to drive savings.
How will the fintech segment evolve in the coming years? Which industries will benefit most from the latest innovations in fintech and how?
Industries across the board are grappling with shared hurdles. Be it pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing retail, etc., common obstacles such as working across data silos, restricted transparency, lack of stakeholder collaboration, and more, are impeding the progress of the procurement and finance functions.
It’s precisely this reason that we engage with a wide spectrum of industries. Our objective is to deliveran integrated procurement platform that drives transparency, enhances operational efficiency, eliminates silos, fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, and propels holistic outcomes that extend beyond mere cost reduction. This epitomizes the future landscape of financial technology, and we are excited to stand at the brink of this innovation.
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