Hi Jussi, welcome to Fintech Interview Series. Tell us about your role at Valtatech and how you started here.
Thank you. I’m Managing Partner and CEO of Valtatech. I drive Valtatech’s business growth, customer success and support our relevant teams on Procurement and Finance transformation and e-invoicing programs delivery. I founded the company 8 years ago.
Could you please tell us a little bit about “Source to Pay” technologies and how they fit into the modern Fintech space?
What Salesforce does for selling, Valtatech and our partners do for company spend. Source to Pay is a business critical process which relates to how and on what a company spends its money on. Every organisation has a process for choosing which suppliers they work with, how they contract with those suppliers, how any commercials are being agreed and how they transact on a day to day basis. Many companies manage these processes manually or using legacy technologies, which exposes them to high management costs, as well as to some major supply chain related risks. The purpose of technology in this space is to automate and optimise this process, reducing costs, bringing transparency on where money is being spend and removing those risks.
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What are the major differences between the platforms that offer source-to-pay and procure-to-pay automation and optimization? How does Valtatech provide both capabilities in the same software?
Source to Pay covers the contracting and sourcing process of suppliers, but Procure-to-Pay refers to the transactional process of buying. The software solutions Valtatech offers in this space are modular and have been designed to meet the immediate, and longer term needs of our customers.
What is Peppol Connector? How does it make working with e-invoices and e-orders so seamless?
Peppol Connector is a Coupa accredited integration mechanism that enables transactions to be made between the PEPPOL network and Coupa customers. Effectively opening up the benefits of the global Peppol e-invoicing standard to all Coupa customers. Enabling them to uplift their supplier adoption targets, and complement forming very effective supplier enablement strategies.
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Could you please tell us more about your partnership ecosystem? How would Coupa users benefit from using Peppol network that Valtatech provides?
By implementing Valtatech Peppol Connector, Coupa customers will get access to the fastest growing global standard for e-invoicing. From a benefit perspective, the connector enables Coupa users to send purchase orders to and receive e-invoices from any Peppol enabled party, while leveraging the automation process already available in Coupa’s solution. The supplier enablement process with Peppol is very easy, as every supplier is onboarded and can send and receive transactions from their existing accounting platforms, which makes everything very user friendly and accurate for both the Coupa customer and their suppliers.
Data automation and business analytics are transforming e-invoicing processes. What kind of features do you offer to customers to automate and transform procurement processes?
By using best of breed technology, modern businesses can achieve a complete, detailed and real-time understanding of their spend, mitigating many of the risks that threaten their businesses, supply chains and supplier relationships. Our aim is to create automated, risk free buying processes, where supplier relationships and contractual obligations are completely visible. With e-invoicing, we can achieve completely error-free transactional processes all the way from the supplier’s systems.
How is AI and machine learning changing e-invoicing and procurement operations? What does your AI roadmap at Valtatech look like?
AI use cases in procurement today mainly extend to spend data analysis, especially when any data requires cleansing after being pulled from 3rd party procurement solutions. Generally the larger the dataset is, the more accurate classifications the algorithm can return. From a roadmap perspective, we have some very exciting things coming in the e-invoicing and supplier risk assessment space.
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Your forecast for the Business Spend Management industry in 2022-23:
I believe we will see better ways for businesses to leverage spend data for further supplier and supply chain risk analysis, by combining it with various 3rd party data sources. The spend management industry will continue to grow and expand into other business critical, functional areas, such as risk and compliance.
Thank you, Jussi! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
Jussi Karjalainen is the Founder and Managing Partner of Valta Technology Group (Valtatech). Valtatech partners with companies around the world to simplify their operations, control their spend and focus on value coming in rather than costs going out. Our team has completed more than 60 financial transformation and Shared Services projects in Europe and Asia Pacific that deliver measurable value. Our difference is to understand your business, match the best technology and implement it to your requirements. We leverage our expertise of best practice, a deep knowledge of successful transformation technology implementation for Procurement automation, AP automation to transform your finance and procurement functions.
Valta Technology Group is a Source to Pay advisory and Managed Services provider specialising in implementing and building value cases for its customer to achieve source-to-pay and procure-to-pay automation and optimisation.
We believe that everything a business does should be simple and drive measurable value. To drive simplicity and value, we focus on uniting the right technology, the right supporting services and the right process together around source to pay value drivers.
We partner with finance and procurement leaders to implement procure to pay and PEPPOL eInvoicing solutions that are right sized for their organisation.
