Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Zip’s inaugural European version of its user conference, Zip Forward. Held in London, the one-day event hosted more than 200 attendees from across Europe, including a couple of partners.
Zip is continuing to grow rapidly and now has over 400 employees and 500 customers worldwide. It opened its London office last year and has since increased its workforce by 5x and more than doubled the European customer count.
Resilience and Risk Orchestration
The main theme for the conference was resilience, with a keynote titled, “Zip for Risk Orchestration.” Given the complexity of risk management and the number of different risks — and associated systems and data sources that procurement (and others) need to manage — this is an area where procurement process orchestration really can make a difference.
Zip talked about risk management and increased resilience for both upstream and downstream procurement. Upstream, new capabilities include pre-made intake templates and a workflow template library for various regulations, integrations with partners (including EcoVadis that made a brief appearance on stage), as well as an automatic risk scoring rating to streamline onboarding. On the downstream side, new functionality includes scheduled risk reviews and tasks but also expanded support for compliant eInvoicing (via a partnership with Sovos) and AI-based payment fraud detection.
Embracing IM&PPO
Even though most customers are still early in their journey with Zip (which is not surprising, given the fact that Zip was founded only five years ago), customers seem to be embracing the IM&PPO approach. Clare Cassano from Invesco held a presentation on their strategy, which is based on a best-of-breed approach where Zip serves as the orchestrator for solutions like Globality (eSourcing), Ironclad (CLM), Process Unity (supplier risk and supplier management), and Oracle (PR/PO creation). Invesco is also planning to integrate with several point solutions used by the business for ordering very specific services like market data, etc., that will allow the end-users to keep working in the systems they are used to and already using.
Damyen Grozdanov from Bitpanda explained how they replaced an old homegrown “P2P” solution in Jira and other siloed solutions with Zip. They now allow different departments and stakeholders to create and maintain their own processes in Zip, leveraging the self-service no-code workflow and integration-building capabilities.
A Great Conference
All in all, it was a great conference with a good mix of Zip company and product updates and practitioner presentations. The venue (Convene 22 Bishopsgate) was the perfect size, with seating for everyone for lunch!
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