Coupa Inspire was held last week, June 24-27 in Las Vegas at the chic Cosmopolitan Hotel and Conference Center. Ardent Partners’ analyst team was in attendance. During the conference, Coupa Software, the San Mateo, California-based provider of end-to-end spend management applications for the cloud, made many announcements — most relating to its family of B2B payments applications, Coupa Pay. Today’s Technology Round-up is a run down of what made news at the conference.
- Release 24 Out Now: On Day 1 of Inspire, Coupa officials announced Release 24, a plethora of updates and new capabilities added to Coupa’s Business Spend Management (BSM) Platform. According to Raja Hammoud, senior vice president of products at Coupa, these product innovations and updates draw on the combined data of Coupa’s customer base (i.e., “Community Intelligence”), and follow the more than 300 capabilities already released throughout the past year.
- One new capability, Procurable Spend Spotlight, leverages Community Intelligence to examine expense reports and identify savings opportunities that were missed by not purchasing a good or service through an existing procurement-supplier contract.
- Another new capability, Prescriptive Recommendations for Coupa Advantage, analyzes Community Intelligence to give users real-time spend assessments, plus recommendations on how to take advantage of savings opportunities that have been negotiated for all Coupa customers.
- Coupa’s BSM platform now also boasts a guided, unified goods and services spend capability, which draws on Coupa’s acquisition of DCR Workforce (read about the deal here) and puts direct, indirect, and complex spend activities all within the user’s reach, guided by the Coupa platform.
- Finally, Coupa’s App Directory now enables users to embed third-party applications onto the BSM platform to enhance their user experience (UX) and drive more functionality and innovation onto the platform. This aligns with Coupa’s philosophy of making the BSM platform a truly open platform.
- Also on Day 1, Coupa officials announced that the company has expanded its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which began nearly four years ago, to give IT leaders more visibility into and control over the procurement of IT products and services. IT users can now use Coupa Open Buy, AWS Marketplace, and Coupa Pay seamlessly and synergistically to search, procure, deploy, pay, and manage thousands of software products available in the AWS Marketplace directly within the Coupa BSM Platform. This should enable more stakeholders within the typical enterprise (in this case, IT) to drive more enterprise spend under procurement’s management. It should also boost governance over IT spend by giving IT leaders more direct insight into what is being purchased by their departments.
- Coupa Pay: So Hot Right Now. Perhaps the longest string of news generated from Coupa Inspire last week involved the many innovations and partnerships for Coupa Pay, its end-to-end B2B payments solution. Coupa has added Coupa Pay Invoice Payments, which will now enable AP/finance staff to use one payment platform to remit payment via multiple methods (e.g., domestic bank transfer, cross-border payment, digital check). Coupa has partnered with TransferMate to make this happen, as TransferMate specializes in providing global payment technologies.
- Coupa also announced at Inspire that it has partnered with a few other payment solution providers to enhance Coupa Pay. These partnerships include:
- Citi Commercial Cards: Coupa will integrate Citi Commercial Cards into the Coupa Pay platform, making it the only provider of virtual cards to the Coupa BSM network. Virtual credit/payment cards are single, unique credit card numbers that are generated for limited time, limited value use (often for specific suppliers and values), and are valid only for that transaction. Citi Commercial Cards will be pre-integrated into the Coupa Pay platform; and Coupa and Citi users will have access to each other’s solutions.
- Stripe: Speaking of virtual payment cards, Coupa has partnered with online payments platform provider, Stripe, to integrate with Coupa Pay to automate, streamline, and ultimately simplify payment acceptance for suppliers. Here’s how it will work: suppliers that integrate their Stripe accounts with Coupa Pay will see virtual card payments route directly from Coupa Pay (via Stripe) into their preferred bank account.
- PayPal: Another high-profile partnership that Coupa announced at Inspire is with PayPal. As a result, Coupa users of all sizes (particularly SMBs) will be able to link their PayPal business accounts to the Coupa Pay platform and digitally enable their suppliers (who may also be on PayPal) to link up to the network for faster payment. This includes contingent/temporary workers, who may use PayPal to receive payment for services rendered. Formalizing a relationship with PayPal enables Coupa to provide even more ways to manage even more enterprise spend, like complex spend.
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