Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann (Part 1)

Procurement and spend management software has gained good adoption in the enterprise.

Here, we discuss the mid-market situation for the sector.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience a bit to yourself as well as to Procurify.

Aman Mann: I’m the CEO and one of the co-founders of Procurify. Procurify is a product or service that is helping organizations empower their teams to make smarter decisions on spend. We help manage an organization’s spending.

Our real mission is to enable organizations to become successful in their own mission. These organizations lack the understanding of how they spend their money. Our product can be adopted easily across an organization because of its ease-of-use, better user experience, and smarter decision making.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a bit of an ecosystem map. Help me understand where you fit in the ecosystem. There are companies like Coupa that are very well-positioned in this market. Who are your competitors? Where do you fit in?

Aman Mann: There is an enterprise space that plays very strongly in this trend of spend management. I would consider them more traditional procurement-focused where they’re focused on larger volumes.

We’ve got new age technology that’s more focused on removing the reactive spend from expense to be more proactive. We are an amalgamation of both worlds and are bringing it to the new age, which is called spend management.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some case studies where you would be the preferred solution. Let’s understand the target segment and where you’re seeing adoption. Where are you the desired solution?

Aman Mann: We work with a lot of organizations on two buckets. One is, where they’re using very traditional and outdated systems. Then there’s the green field space where the ad hoc processes have been stapled together just to achieve the result they’re trying to get.

In a lot of cases, they’re still based on paper. That’s the big challenge of back office. It’s still very traditional-minded and slow moving for technology advancement.

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down and make it a bit more descriptive and visceral?

Aman Mann: You can take technology companies that are fast-moving and growing. The back office processes are usually handled by accounting systems. Everyone else is just flowing into these accounting systems through requisitions or processes where they need to buy something. Once they have the need to buy, these organizations have a lot of information flow in an unstructured and siloed way that just goes to the finance team.

They have to acquire these goods and make sure that it’s the right goods at the right cost. They grow and put in ad hoc processes to try and manage this.

At some point, you’re not going to scale. The other part is that it’s a mistake, or some form of reaction occurs to either a surprise spend or a decision was made that didn’t help the organization move forward. When they have these challenges, the finance team or the operations team tries to improve the back office.

A solution like ours will come in and they will distribute it across the organization so it can be in their hands to make requests and have the proper approval process, to have centralized or decentralized purchasing team, and have all that information flow back to the finance team so they have real-time visibility into the decision making. That also allows the organization to move quicker because it’s now in real-time.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Procurify CEO Aman Mann
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