>> Announcer: From London, England. It's theCUBE covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA brought to you by Coupa. >> Hi welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire '19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Mads Fink Jensen, partner advisory from KPMG. Mads, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here. >> It's great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us, lots of folks here in London for Coupa Inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Coupa talks about PIPE, procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses, but procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today, and what some of those waves of disruption are. >> Yeah. So you could say traditionally, procurement has been very much about making agreements with suppliers. The business have had a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, in many cases delaying projects and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now, they expect, you from, different back office functions, including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a projects in the business, and you go to procurement asking for a specific service or product, and procurement says, "Ah this will take "four to six months", that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now, you could say, transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. They have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could day. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations they need to be much more predictive, and understand what's going on, both in the business, but also in the market. And then you could say, on the other hand, procurement traditionally, they do a contract, and then they finalize the contract, and then they kind of keep their hands off. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract of course, that's a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operationalize the contract. So in terms of making sure that the users in the business, that they can actually use the contract and buy under that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement, which also means that you will see now` different operating models. You will see different interaction with businesses, and you will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >> I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say, an incumbent Chief Procurement Officer, or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How, in your advisory role, do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function, to be much more strategic, and much more impactful to a business? >> Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Coupa as a platform to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement, and actually we don't see a Coupa implementation as an IT implementation project, we see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that, one thing is that you start changing the way that you are doing things, but it's also a mindset change. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And the challenge here for CPOs, so for procurement officers, is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we're implementing solutions like Coupa, is of course taking away all the transactional work. That's automated, and we are also providing insights. So insight into spend, insight into transaction, to transaction processes, to turn around times, to delivery, to you know, all these kind of things. And the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people. >> And tell me how, from KPMG's perspective, how is Coupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >> Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean, Coupa is a technology, but it's also much more than a technology, because as Coupa also emphasizes, it's also about a community. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So the thing is that, with a platform like Coupa, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see spend patterns, so in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis what their need will be. So in that way, you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also, you could say, as a procurement person, as a sourcing manager or category innovators, as Coupa is calling it, you now have the insight to actually think more strategic on your supplier base, on the market tendencies, you can see how other companies are procuring stuff, are they going from one type of vendors to another type of vendors, and how is that going. So you could say, Coupa is a tool, not only to structure processes and do transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >> You mentioned the word predictive a second ago, and one of the things that, well the P in Coupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there. Helping a business in whatever industry it's in, go from being reactive to proactive to predictive, is that a game changer, or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >> Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry, there are many different ways of looking at the procurement, but a general thing across industries that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods, or pharmaceutical or whatever, is that procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving, because traditionally, procurement they are a little bit isolated, like IT was 10, 15 years ago, didn't really understand what's going on in the business in many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they establishing contracts and things like that, but the thing is that if you don't understand your business, and if you don't understand the way that your business operates, you know, you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy, and then embrace innovation, because, I mean, even though Coupa as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now, with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who know what comes tomorrow. There will be a number of different things changing over the course of two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way, adapting what the company in general is adapting. >> So tell me, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >> Absolutely, so KPMG have developed a framework we call Powered Procurement, which is a framework that gives, you could say, clients a very, very structured way of doing a transformation, and that framework is actually built on top of the Coupa platform. So we have developed a model, which is, you could say, technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that is placed on top of the Coupa platform, where we utilizes the possibilities the platform have, and one core thing is that the mantra of Coupa is measurable as business value, and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get measurable business value, because how do you measure it, what is it that you want to measure, is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Coupa platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way, because you actually don't really think about technology, you think about business transformation, and that's why I think the way that we utilize Coupa as a platform is quite unique. >> So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier on the industry side, when you look at that compared to your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be, to your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI, or a technology, I want this to simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. >> Mads: Absolutely. >> Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >> So it's a really good question, actually, because you could say, in reality, the value comes from a meaningful experience, and you could say traditionally, when you have, you know, I was part of the Maersk organization, the Danish shipping company, and we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could execute their role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process, where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Coupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course, it takes longer in a business environment, you could say, also because you need to do different sourcing exercises, there are regulations in the public sector and so forth, but in the way that you're thinking of how you procure, and get access to the goods and services that you need for executing your role, it's a very different mindset. And that's where technologies like Coupa comes in as a, you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >> So KPMG clearly has choice in who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Coupa and the partnership means to KPMG, and the competitive differentiation it might deliver. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean there are a number of different platforms in the market, of course, and it's actually quite interesting this year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform, and I can tell that both the suppliers, and the market and the suppliers in general, have changed quite a lot since then. (laughs) >> Lisa: I can imagine. >> And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that, you know, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulties in following up with a company like Coupa. And you could say Coupa as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all it adopts the cloud technology, which means that companies doesn't have to think about you know, maintenance, operations, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions, and it has this ability to create this community, because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community, which create, you could say, a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competing landscape. So in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Coupa works with the community, and takes intelligence from the community, and based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >> Last question for you, Mads. The category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define, what does that from KPMG's perspective? >> Yeah, so you could say, for me it's actually quite relieving that there is an actor in the market that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a new term that Coupa have introduced. I mean there have been variations on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this is all about, because business spend management is much more than just than the, you could say, the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is of course a huge part of it, but I mean, there are expense management, as an example, you have all the procurement stuff, you have spend in a lot of different areas like salary, that's not kind of part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense, you could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas, embrace business spend management. And in essence, you could say, I think, Rob also mentioned it in a very good way, this is actually, it's the procurement department that manages a huge part of the value of the company, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task that organizations have, and the good thing is that we see, increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >> Well Mads, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE, and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG and Coupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you Lisa, it was a pleasure to be here. >> Likewise. For Mads, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching.

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 Mei brought to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Koopa inspire 19 very pleased to welcome to the cube for the first time we have Dean Henry the EVP of business financing and supplier management from American Express Dean welcome to the cube thank you happy to be here so let's talk about payments we those of us in our date lives as consumers the b2c transactions are so easy these days right you can transact from your phone from your watch it's we're doing everything we're paying bills we're buying things yet in the b2b space business payments haven't had as rapid as innovation as we seen on the on the consumer side talk to me a little bit about the business-to-business payments industry from MX's perspective before we get in to what you guys are doing with Cooper yeah well first comment on on the innovation you're absolutely right the innovation that's happening and retail payments hasn't made its way to b2b payments I think that's mostly a function of you know a consumer having the ease to try something new download an app and and change the way that they transact a bit at a store but with with whomever they're paying whereas a big business has a lot of processes that drive their their business spend and the way that they manage it and systems and you know as we're here talking with Koopa today you know the the processes that they automate and that they bring are critical to you know making payments happen and because because of that there's just barriers to entry that make make b2b payments harder to mirror the speed that you see in the retail side that said there's a lot of exciting things happening you know b2b payments is a hundred and twenty seven trillion dollar market globally it's a big profit pool that a lot of players are innovating in and when you look into the landscape and you consider who's playing out there you know there's traditional big banks that have been sort of the stalwarts of Global Payments there's obviously a large and grow and growing FinTech community with new companies every day that are in the media offering new capabilities to to clients and then there's players like American Express and I think we're actually uniquely positioned in that landscape with not too many exactly like us and when you look at you know the big banks and some of the challenges that they have when I talk to our customers about fees and and you know processes that take a while or money that moves with with relative uncertainty in terms of how much is actually going to show up and the beneficiaries account based on lifting fees as money moves between banks and then you look at the FinTech community that's new innovative solutions but you're not sure that they're always going to be around you know after the next funding cycle I think we're we're trying to play an in the middle where were a great alternative to the FinTech community we're a global platform for payments we're a global platform for lending so we can really do all the things that a FinTech can do all the things that a bank can do in many instances and and do that with the brand and the certainty that is a max and so we're excited about the space and we're investing a lot of time and energy and and partnering where we need to in order to make sure our customers can transact where they want us to to help them facilitate commerce right that point of enabling a customer to transact where they want what influences are you is the American Express seeing and being able to infuse into your partnerships from the consumer side from that consumer who buy something with a click or a swipe on Amazon and wants to be able to do something similar in their business day job tell me about the influence that American Express is seeing and what that position that you just subscribe is allowing you guys to say all right this is a direction that we're gonna go and because we know yeah I need to meet you mr. customer where you are right what look I think part of it is is demographics to be perfectly honest if you look at Gen Y and Gen Z they're they're more of the decision makers in today's management they will be even more tomorrow's management and so they to your point have that expectation that their business life shouldn't be that much more complex in their personal life so so what we're trying to do is find the partners that have the best user experience and make sure our solutions work seamlessly there that's step one that's that's what we're doing here with Koopa step two is we're also trying to make sure that our capabilities on on Amex a digital real-estate works just it just as easily as our retail side of our business and we're we're doing that you know with a with the unifying principles and American Express which is you know the trust and the service and the brand that that we offer to our clients but then also the the merchant rewards so there's a rich history of of American Express providing a differentiated value proposition with the credit card rewards that that exists and we take take that capability into our our business relationships and make sure that it's a value add to those customers that want it so let's talk about what American Express is doing with Kupa what was it just announced with Koopa pay so yeah Koopa pay you know I was impressed by the stats that Rob put up there they're they're growing quickly and we want to be part of it we're a candidly following the requests of our clients who want American Express as a payment option inside the Koopa pay we offer a tremendous value prop inside of Koopa pay the data that flows with a payment the data that we're able to collect that differentiates us from our competition helps our our clients reconcile their payments eliminate the paper realize the efficiencies that that Koopas clients are excited about and so we're they're simply enabling American Express to be a payment option and my hope and I think Koopas hope is that that's step one of a partnership and and will be able to do more together to serve our collective clients so this is enabling American Express of virtual cards be available as a payment option within Kupa pay yes and what is a virtual card so virtual card is is a virtual credit card number it can be a one-time use or a multi-use okay and you know our our clients use it for several different reasons you know buyers of of goods use a virtual card in order to make the payment of a supplier easier to get more data along with the transaction so that they can reconcile a payment to a purchase order and to associated invoices the suppliers get benefit as well and in that they to get enhanced data to reconcile payment that they receive on their end there's also working capital benefit in that if if a buyer chooses to pay early an invoice we can extend financing and pay the the supplier earlier so that they have more working capital to operate their business and so so it's a real balanced value prop where both parties are realizing value is this going to enable a buyer to have benefits like increased security with the way the virtual card works yeah what increased security and so far as a virtual card isn't is encrypted the fact that you know American Express stands behind all of our card payments with our brand and our promise that differentiates from you know a traditional bank payment you know ACH and other other low value clearings that don't have those guarantees along with it and so so that is a big differentiator but but I think candidly the the biggest benefit our clients see is the enhanced data and the working capital I think that's where we're trying to enrich both sides of the transaction give more data to enable the automation that's happening in the industry and extend credit so that businesses can operate more efficiently and and and by the things that they need to buy and hire the people they need to hire is this also something that will give suppliers and buyers more visibility you talked about enhanced data well they now have more visibility over buyers like different supplier options or suppliers with different ways that they can get paid so certainly enhance visibility on on when a suppliers getting paid and relative to the invoice date and what we're trying to do is work with Koopa and work with our partners around well how do we enhance the data so that so that as you know Koopa talks about the community of suppliers that their buyers utilize how can we be part of that how do we support the buyers and making decisions the suppliers and utilizing American Express as a as a source to be a verified business that has gone through all the legal legal checks that are required in commerce and bringing both of those capabilities to to do a transaction on the Koopa Network one of the stats that Rob mentioned this morning and love stats I really geeked out over them I don't know why you say there's five million plus suppliers on the Koopa platform is that an advantage that American Express sees to help extend the footprint of your virtual cards absolutely I what I'm candidly more excited about is the millions and millions of suppliers that are on the American Express network and that's an asset that I see personally as something that we can work with with Koopa and other partners to bring you know the businesses that are already verified that are on our network that we personally talk to every you know every year and bring those verified profiles to the commerce networks like Koopa so that it's easier to transact on Koopa if you have an American Express card got it and then last question for you is if we look at this partnership what was announced today this is launching in the UK and Australia first and then you'll roll it up more globally can you tell me a little bit about why those two regions yeah one that's going to be available for customers to use so so the honest answer is we wanted to be fast to market and quick and quick out to our customer base the UK and Australia are two very important geographies for us so we're launching first in those places by the end of the year and then looking at rolling out in the US and early 2020 and then from their expanding alongside excellent well Dean thank you for joining me on the cube this afternoon sharing what's new with Amex and Cooper we appreciate your time thank you so much really happy to be here excellent for Dean Henry I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from Cooper inspire London 19 thanks for watching [Laughter]

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 brought to you by Cooper. >>Hey, welcome to the cube. At least the Martin on the ground in London, a Coupa inspire 19 and I'm really excited to be joined by my last guest of the day. Save the best for last. We have Roger Hamoud, the EVP of products from Kupo Russia. Welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming here. Of course, it's been great. We've had a, we've had a great day. Lots of buzz and excitement in the expo hall. The lights are jammed. It's happy hours. Happy hour for time for the Q during happy hour. So I know your keynote is tomorrow, so we'll get to that since we won't cover that. But talk to me about some of the new product innovations that Cuba announced today. The last time we spoke at inspire Las Vegas was only a few months ago. So what's new? Wow. A lot is new. It's, it's hard to believe. >>It's only been three months since then. It's been so close. Um, we very much continue our, um, focus on our community. Powered, uh, capabilities. Uh, this has been an incredible focus for us. Uh, so most recently we've added to all of the announcements we talked about at, uh, Vegas, uh, the, um, next waves of source together the opportunity to bring our community to come and source, uh, using their collective spent power and lots of new enhancements in that area. And also we're taking our supplier insights to the next level. One of the exciting capabilities our customers loved is that being part of a community member, I can come in and I can look at insights across all of my suppliers, uh, from the entire community. What we have, we've been working with them on is constantly adding more and more information to that. So now we have diversity data. >>So you can come in and you can search for suppliers that meet your women. Exactly. Exactly. Those are increasingly becoming more and more important. And then we can help companies source with the right suppliers much more easily right off the bat. Um, other areas that we've announced today was a coupon pay for expenses in early access program. Uh, we also announced invoice thing. Um, going on GA, when we talked in Vegas, it was still in the early access program, uh, capabilities and opening up our platform, Coupa as a platform. >> Uh, tell me about that, cause I wasn't quite clear when Rob was talking about it this morning. I thought I wanna dig in that with you. Kupa as a platform. What is that? What does it look like? So what's exciting about this is, so from our inception as a company, we were always had this old in Cooper about being open as an ally for the entire ecosystem that our customers might have. >>Our vision has always been, we want to be the, ultimately the business screen for everything business spend management related for our customers. So over years we kept taking the level of openness with our partners through different, um, different levels. If you say, if you will, for example, we started with just integrations in the beginning and we certify these integrations with coupon link. Um, we've taken it most recently where we allow partners to embed their mini apps within Cooper. So, for example, um, you can see in one of our partners EcoVadis now they have the capability to embed their supplier diversity data sustainability data right on the supplier record. Okay. And what's beautiful about this is that our customers, when they look at it, it looks a one beautiful unified experience and bringing all the data in context for what they want. Um, today, this morning, uh, Rob shared one example from Amadeus for, uh, trip integrations. >>So right on the homepage, I can see right within Cooper, I can see all their bookings that I've done with the travel provider, Mike pre-approvals, expense reports, all within one unified experience. But ultimately where we want to take coop as a platform is to become this app directory that, uh, third party partners and platform developers start building applications to extend Copa to bring more choice and value to our customers. Okay. Wow. Is that one of the things I saw Rob shared this morning was integration with Slack. Yes. So business folks can review, approve, or reject, like expenses for example, right from within Slack without even having to go into the platform. Yes, yes. That you hit on a very important concept, which we call the best UI is no UI in many ways. And the idea there is um, we always put ourselves in the user's shoes and ask ourselves how do we get them what they need with the least friction? >>In some cases that might involve a user experience because you need to ask them questions and make cases. We can automate the whole thing. So we just do it. And in many cases it means we go to them to where they are such as in Slack, I'm going to ask you to leave Slack, go somewhere else right then and there you should be able to approve or reject why you have to go anywhere else. Is that what, what Cuba means by no UI is the best UI, correct. Best UI is no UI. So ultimately wherever there is effort, we, we want to involve people only when they need to add value. That's it. And as much as we're able to automate, that's great. So we take that off of their table and we also adjust to the type of experience they need. Sometimes just a text message is enough sometimes to bring the data to me into a collaboration applications that I want. >>Um, sometimes we, we help them approve right from, um, a button. You don't even go into Kupa in order to do that. So always thinking of how we drive adoption, drive adoption. And it's an important concept, not just on the employee side of companies, it's even more so on the supplier side as well. Now when you think of any or like large organizations, they have tens of thousands of thousands of suppliers, many have hundreds of thousand suppliers. And the supplier ecosystem is everything from very small contractor, mom and pop shop, maybe two people or even one person all the way to very, very large companies. Okay. So as you look at that whole spectrum, you have to really think what does every audience need? And so in many cases, these people, um, they may need to do everything very quickly straight from an email without having to remember a user ID and a password to log into something. >>So eliminates friction at every step of the process for them. Wow. So let's talk about that Vic community insights. As we look at some of the, uh, the data that KUKA has gotten from finance leaders of the UK, that was like a survey that you guys, yes, I did recently have 253 decision makers and finance and some of the numbers were glaring. Like, wow, 96% of these decision makers said we don't have complete visibility correct. Of all of our spent. And then I was talking to a customer today who said, we've got now gotten 95% of all of our business men going through Coupa and that was within less than a year. Yes. So the opportunity there to deliver that visibility and those insights back to the community is, is pumped, is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly exciting. We're starting to see more and more the sentiment that's in key, loud and clear and um, by working constantly on the AE, the accelerated and coupon, we work on getting more and more of the spend for each and every customer under management. >>Um, we, when we start to projects for customers right off the bat, uh, we use our AI classification tools before they even start with Copa, where we start helping them get visibility onto all of their existing spent so that as they start into their Coupa journey, they are always looking at it holistically. Okay. So we know them, realize all of that data and provide them insights and reports right off the bat as well. Tell me about the customer interactions that you have as the EVP of product, lot of customers on the platform, a lot of data there. How are customers influential? Yes, yes. The direction. Like for example, you know, obviously I won't give a secret sauce, but for Cooper inspire 20, 20, what are some of the things that we might see customers influencing in terms of your roadmap that direction? Partnerships? Yes. Yes. >>Um, in general, the way, um, we've always worked, uh, at Coupa with our customers and we call them like our community members really is an inc very incredibly tight partnership. Um, we have three releases a year, January, may and September. Each of them packed with roughly about anywhere 72, 19 new features and capabilities. And all of these capabilities are touched either conceived by customers, with customers or touched by customers in the form of working with them on early access validation and all of that. And for me, one of my most favorite things I get to enjoy about working in SAS and, and uh, being at Cooper is that as soon as you are rolling out these capabilities and turning them on in the cloud, customers are using them. So even though like for example right now my entire team has just finished the walkthroughs of all our may release for inspire. >>And when we come back from this trip, uh, we will start the, you know, the, these, the design and, and um, definition. Um, often we might hear of new requirements that might come up and because we are InsightSquared able to, um, here at just what it makes sense and actually be incredibly responsive to what we see. >> How do you do that? How do you look through all the different responses and correlate that data and determine what makes sense to stack? Rank in terms of priorities for new features and new capabilities. So it's definitely an art and a science for sure. Um, but there's a framework that, uh, we follow, uh, since the beginning and we continue to follow and continues to serve us really well. Uh, which is always balancing between three drivers of customers, market and innovation. So the customer one is the obvious one of course, where and many events like this and one on ones and online community. >>We're talking to customers and they're specifically coming and asking for help in areas. Now, we may not build the feature exactly as they asked, but we listened to the pain beneath it and late using the latest technologies, we think of what is the best approach to solve the real pain that they have. So that's one part of the planning for every release cycle. The other is overall market. So for example, as we grow into more regions, uh, newer areas, new spend categories, um, new adjacent powered applications that our customers are needing, um, we started expanding in that area as well. Um, for example, we, right now in London, um, a lot of, uh, when I joined Cooper back in 2012, uh, we were just starting the, uh, entry into the, uh, Mel market and a lot of the product capabilities were market driven in the sense that we were spending a lot of time on compliance and different regulations and all of that. >>And the third is innovation. And what is always one of the things as we bring people on board at Cooper and talk about the framework, um, innovation for us is what we call pragmatic innovation. And it's comes from deep understanding what are the customer problems, what are the market problems? And then we ask ourselves using everything, the latest technologies, what is the best way? So you'll never hear us talk about AI for AI sake and blockchain and all of that would always talking about do we deeply understand the problem and what is the most appropriate? Um, so we call them CMI customer innovation. Uh, within my products organization, every product managers usually has a vision for their product and they have a full release roadmap. And in each full release roadmap, they are listing things as C M I in many cases the same capability is C and M and I, so it becomes an art and a science of balancing those types of things. >>But ultimately when we look at our collective release of CMI, we're asking ourselves, how much does this release accelerate the success goals of our customers? Right. And generally that's the framework that we use. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. In terms of acceleration, some of the numbers that Rob shared this morning, we're, I think your customers are collectively approving invoices 30% faster than last year. I said medium, mid size market, customers are getting lot going live on Kupa in about four months. Correct. And mid large enterprises and about eight months. So. Right. And I've talked to a number of customers today about the speed of which they're able to get onto the platform and actually start seeing business value. So that's a free coupon for acceleration was well dissected today. Yes. Yes. It's definitely, yeah. Um, these are the vision areas that Rob talked about today. >>And in each of these vision areas, we're always asking ourselves, how do we continue to accelerate? So that's actually how one of the ideas was born around the turtle is I'm the hair, which is we want to accelerate cycle times, cycle times, and what are the different ways we can do this? What can we borrow from um, the, uh, our consumer lives to do this? And that's where the game unification came. Yes. And sure enough, it was one of those things that got people super excited and, and they're putting more attention into it. Well, the consumer side of our lives is we're so demanding because we can get anything that we want. We can buy products and services, we can pay bills with a clicker swipe. And so the B to C side from a payments perspective has innovated far more rapidly than the B2B side has. >>Correct. A lot more challenged there on the B2B side. But as consumers, we want a simple experience. One of the customers I spoke to who said when he was looking for technology, he's on what something that looks like Amazon marketplace. Yeah. Because from an adoption perspective, my teams will understand it. You so that the consumerization always interests me because we are those pretty much, you know, 12 plus hours a day and to see how software companies like KUKA are taking and meeting the needs of those customers, obviously it's not an overnight process. It gets people excited. It gets its absolutely is you right. That always fascinated me also how I've seen so many companies, um, like people almost have two personalities. Like they go into their personal life, they have a personality, they go into their professional lives and like, Oh, it's okay. It's like a backend system. >>This and this and this. Um, but increasingly the new generation is no longer tolerating and the drive is starting to just go find those shifts that happen changing, right? Yes, yes. But I can't, if I can have this in my personal life, then I need to be able to transact. Exactly. Exactly. Why does it take 45 days? Exactly. Exactly. Five days. Um, so last question for you. Since your keynote is tomorrow. Yes. What are some of the strategic visionary elements that you're going to leave the audience with? So I'm going to leave the audience with the key pillars of our strategy. Um, latest innovations we've done towards them and where we are taking them in the years ahead. One of the things I've always done over the years at inspire is we always share at preview of what, um, the community has been talking to us about and we're working with. >>And usually at the end of it, a lot of new community members might come in and ask to participate in some of the development because it means a lot to them for their own business. And then usually by the following inspire, we start showing these things actually live and, and, um, executed on. So the, um, the three strategic pillars I'll be sharing and talking about are all around the pipe that Trump talked about. Yep. How do I capture more and more spend under management? So we'll be talking about the consumerizing experiences voice using voice use Copa using facial recognition in Cooper. Uh, we'll be talking about new concepts around travel, around the group card school, applying all of it around the theme, focused on the um, end users and delight them, blow them away with consumer experiences. And then now that we do all of that, we can jump into the power users because we are increasing that spend under management. >>The theme by far is all around suite synergy suite synergy. So we seriously, this doesn't exist in the market. The market overall was all siloed applications. We're creating a new category and we've created these beautiful, elegant flows for our customers today. But there's also a wonderful long journey ahead in what we are taking up. Well maybe we'll get to talk about synergy at inspire 20 slowly. I will, we would love to have you again. Excellent. We're going to in Vegas for the afternoon. Best of luck in your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you the next inspire. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for Raja Hamoud. I, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Coupa inspire 19 from London. Bye for now.

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

(upbeat tech music) >> Announcer: From London, England it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Insp!re 19 Emea. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re 19. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the CEO and Chairman of Coupa, Rob Bernshteyn. Rob, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, thank you for being with me. >> It's great to be here, so we are in with all of these customers and partners, this has been busy all day. You started things off today with a great keynote. I was telling you before we went live, I lost count of how many big customer examples were sprinkled, and I think infused throughout your keynote. I was looking at some numbers, Coupa just keeps doing this. 5x increase in spend under management since 2016, that's only three years. You guys have thousands of customers, five million suppliers on the platform, lot of growth. What are some of the key drivers to this great growth that you're seeing? Well a couple of things, I mean first of all, this is a huge total addressable market. Every company in the world could do a better job of the way they manage their business spending, and they could use information technology, hopefully from Coupa to help make that happen, and we are so proud to cultivate this community of like minded, thoughtful professionals that want to apply best practices, best in-class modern technology solutions like the ones we offer obviously, to drive quantifiable, measurable, outcomes for the companies that they work for. So in many ways, this is a celebration of our customer community and it's a wonderful opportunity to be with our customers here like this every year in Europe and every year in the United States, and now frankly in lots of other places around the world. >> So one of the themes that was also expressed during the keynote was Rachel Botsman's theme of trust and I think about the open community, the open platform and the community that Coupa is building, there's a lot of earned trust there that Coupa has earned from this growing community. Talk to me about what that means to you and the whole team and how it's influencing the direction that Coupa is going in. >> It means a lot to me personally frankly. The O in Coupa stands for Open, and that means not only technically open in terms of APIs and integrations, but it means open in spirit, open in dialogue, honest, transparent communications. I feel that our industry in enterprise software has a legacy or a history of a lot of PowerPoints, and a lot of demos, but frankly, quite a few failures of large scale deployments and a whole host of sectors. And we want to be part of the solution, we want to have an open, authentic, honest communication with our customers, with our prospective customers in the sales process, with our partners, with all of my Coupa colleagues, so we can avoid the friction and nonsense of politics that often gets in the way of driving measurable, meaningful value for every constituent. It's a very, very important thing to me, it's important to my team, and that's something we're doing our very best to cultivate in this Coupa community that we're creating. >> Speaking of cultivation, Coupa is cultivating this category of Business Spend Management. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you are with that. >> Sure, Business Spend Management is a pretty straightforward three words to describe the fact that our buyers and our customers are responsible for literally trillions of dollars and pounds and dollars and euros of spend all over the world. And as information becomes more and more transparent, the buyer, the one who's repsonsible for that spend becomes more and more powerful. So we sit on the side of that buyer, we give them information technology solutions from sourcing, to inventory management, to spend analytics, to procurement, to expensing, to invoicing, to payments, to supplier performance. All the capabilities needed to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their organizations, and help their companies become more profitable so that every one of these Coupa community customers we have here could get more bang for their buck and be that much more operationally efficient frankly in driving their own company's visions and missions and whatever it is that they bring to the world. And that's very aspirational for us and we're excited that so many have come on board with this establishment of the Business Spend Management category with us. >> So if we look at the PIPE, as you were calling it this morning, P-I-P-E, procure, invoice, pay, expense, I memorized that, you've got this one platform that can deliver all of that to this growing community of users who have the ability to get that visibility. That is one of the biggest challenges, I was reading some stats recently about the number of businesses, they were the percentages of businesses that don't have complete visibility over their spend, it's high. >> It's very high, we just did a study of 250 or so CFOs in the UK, and they're doing a great job at budgeting and reporting, but they have minimal visibility into their supply relationships, especially with what's happening here with Brexit. They have minimal visibility in supply risks, supply chain risks, and one of the ingredients that I think we're very special at and I'm proud of is the U in Coupa, the user centricity. In order to have visibility into your spend, you have to have adoption, you have to have people purchasing, spending, expensing, paying, processing invoices, everything that you just mentioned through this pipe on one centralized platform with a common UI layer, User Experience layer or User Interface, common business logic layer, common data model, use of community intelligence to help you make the best purchasing decisions, spend decisions. So we're really on the forefront of something very, very exciting because this adoption level is happening through this user centricity, and it's given these companies control and visibility of spend, and what could be more important to driving profitability, sustained business development? I think we're in a very unique position to help these customers. >> So is one of the biggest challenges for those, think it was 96% of those UK financial decision makers that you guys surveyed said, "We don't have complete visibility." Is it because they have legacy siloed solutions that don't give them that common layer? Or is it because maybe that and a mixture of users just not adopting it because it's not as intuitive to use? >> It's a number of things. First of all, for every process, whether it's procurement, expenses, invoicing, or payments, they have seperate systems to your point. Some cases, they don't even have systems. They're calling in orders, they're handling paper invoices, so there are different levels of maturity in each of those four areas. So one is getting them on to a common platform where all of those are orchestrating together. Secondarily, there's an opportunity to create synergy between those areas, so a lot of things that are getting expensed really should be preapproved and should be routed toward preferential pricing that procurement can negotiate on behalf of the user. Many times invoices are duplicate coming in from suppliers and AP departments are so excited that they pay quickly, but they're not necessarily sure whether they received the goods and services that the invoice is for. So having one common platform, that's the C in Coupa, Comprehensive. One common comprehensive platform for all these business processes is critical, leveraging the synergy of all them working together is critical, and getting that widespread user adoption is part of the secret formula here. >> Let's talk about the community. It's big, it's growing, 1.3 trillion in spend managed, and I watched our video back that you and I did a few months ago, it was 1.2. So that was four months ago, and you showed a bar chart today of just the last 12 months, had to look up this way to see that, so this community that has the ability to help derive and leverage the insights, talk to me about the insights and being able to help businesses go from reactive to predictive as a game changer for Coupa. >> Sure, it's a huge game changer and we really aspire to be, if you will, the tail that wags the dog in the enterprise software industry overall because the enterprise software industry, in effect, every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process. What we've done with community intelligence is we've aggregated, anonymized, and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we could be prescriptive about. So we could tell our customers and we're telling them, "Hey, our community is having challenges with such "and such supplier based on literally perhaps millions "of dollars and millions of pounds in transactional spend. "We recommend you consider this supplier in "that same category because our community is having "great success with them. "The products are being shipped on time, "there's no war over invoicing, there's no breakage in "what's delivered." Those are just some examples, we're helping them think through commodities. A lot of our customers forgiven commodity, they have 20, 30 different suppliers. We're helping them think through in their industry. How can they do supply consolidation that makes sense based on benchmarking across the entire industry? We're helping them avoid supplier risk, we're helping them avoid fraud, we're identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we're seeing around the entire world in real time and we're prescribing actions to be taken before payments go out. So these are just some examples of what we're doing, we're doing things in benchmarking based on community intelligence, we're really just at the tip of the sphere of what's possible and we've prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions in our platform to our customers. Many of them are taking those prescriptions and are making their businesses more operationally fit, and more agile, which is something we're very, very proud of. >> Speaking of those prescriptions, I think the number you shared this morning was 22,000 prescriptions delivered in one year? >> In the last 12 months, that's right. >> So we've got to talk about acceleration 'cause we've talked about the COUP, the acceleration, that is one example of that. I also saw that you guys have gotten, customers are doing approvals 30% faster than they were a year ago. You're getting mid-market customers up and running in four months, large enterprises up in eight months, talk to me about that acceleration that you guys are achieving. >> Absolutely, the A in Coupa is about Accelerated, it's about learning from our entire customer base and taking those learnings and making them part of best practices-based appointments so we could go faster and faster and faster. We look at retail customer, we've done dozens of retail customers, large and small. We know how to set up catalogs, we know how to set up workflow, we know how to think through the analytics that they need. So when they get going with the deployment from Coupa, they can get up and running way faster than with going back to five or six years ago where you have to think about it from scratch and a blueprint. They could leverage the insight from the community with doing that in mid-market, with doing that in subverticals like credit unions, for example. Biotechs, we're doing it in insurance, we're doing it in pharma, all hosts of industries, and I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we're going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers. And the other element that's important here is it's not just taking the customer live, all of our customers grow with us. They get more and more value every year, this is why our renewal rate is so strong and customers add more business with us because they're getting value and that value continues to grow, and that's really what value as a service is about. We're not a software company, and we're not a software as a service company. We're truly a value as a service company, which is a very different concept and one that we're cultivating in this marketplace. >> What are some of your favorite, I know you love being in front of the customers, what are some of your favorite examples that really show the value that Coupa is delivering to the changing role of procurement, making that girl or guy much more strategic and much more of a partner to the business? >> Sure, I shared some examples this morning that I really loved and appreciated celebrating some of our trendsetters, or what we call spendsetters. You look at Zalando, our retailer where they weren't necessarily going to take them so seriously about savings, but when they went to marketing and said, "We can give you much more bang "for your marketing budget "so you could reach more potential consumers," well of course they embraced that. And we gave them a usable opportunity, a usable platform for doing that as similar Zalando, they engaged. Now they have something like 85% spender management. When we started working with them, they had zero purchase orders, everything was the wild west. You look at, I was just speaking to one of our customers at Procter & Gamble just five minutes ago here at the expo. They've run more than 50 billion pounds of spend through the Coupa platform, 50 billion. That's not easy, but they've done that in just a couple of years with us, and not only did they have visibility spent, but they're saving, they're routing purchases to preferred suppliers, so the list just goes on and on and on our website, at Coupa.com on the Customers tab, you'll see obviously dozens of customers holding up signs of the real measurable value they're getting from working with us and that's something that we really take a lot of pride in. >> That speaks for itself. Last question for you Rob, talk to me about those strategic partnerships that Coupa has. I know some news coming out today with what you guys are doing with American Express. >> Sure, we've entered the payment space and we entered it because our customer community asked us for it. They said, "Look, if we're procuring goods "and services through you, why wouldn't we all, "and we're doing invoice and we're doing all "of the components of the pipe, "why wouldn't we also go deeper into payments, help us pay." Because many now have to log in to all these different ERP systems and kick off batch process, so we went into payments. And in payments, we have a host of partnerships. Now, today we announced the relationship with American Express in the UK and Australia for virtual credit card payments. Now it's very simple in Coupa, someone needs a good or service, it gets routed through workflow for approval. Once approved, a dynamic credit card number is generated by American Express, the individual makes the purchase, and all the reconciliation, the back-end is handled by Coupa. All the reporting, the visibility, the insights to price points and category assessments are there and visible and the company's in a position to fine tune their spend profile. So that's just one example, and we're doing things in dynamic discounting and accelerating payments. We've just launched today in general availability and Robby will be discussing it tomorrow ahead of business acceleration. We launched our batch payments capability, the ability to do invoice payments in batch along any rail, whether it be banking relationships, whether it be eCheck, whether it be credit card, going into one environment and kicking off batch payments without having to wait for all these different ERP systems to take hold. So we're really at the, in my mind, at the very beginning of addressing a huge market opportunity, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. I'm particularly proud of the customer community developing around us, and we're excited about the days, weeks, months, quarters, and years to come. >> So you talked about, last question, the big TAM, in this total adjustable market. What are some of the core elements to Coupa's path to a billion in revenue? >> We're not as exciting to many investors as a hot startup that grows really quickly and maybe has some sort of viral component to it. We've been at this for over 10 years, we've grown thoughtfully, we've grown carefully. The growth is fast 30, 40 plus percent, but it's thoughtful and careful, it's one customer at a time. We're careful in how much we spend on sales and marketing, especially want customers to choose us rather than us hard-selling them on everything, we want the offering to sell itself. We have an ecosystem of systems integrators, now more than 3,000, Centric, APMG, Deloitte, and others that are certified on deploying Coupa. We're expanding our product footprint, our customers now use on average 4.7 applications from us and they're consuming those applications rather than us pushing them on them. We're expanding globally, we're expanding in terms of the enterprise business and the mid-market business. Our mid-market business is now really at scale and scaling beautifully, it's a beautiful business model. So those are just some of the vectors in which we'll continue to expand, but I think the path to $1 billion for us is very clear, and ultimately comes down to execution, delivering for every customer, making sure they're getting value from working with us year in and year out, and I think before you know it, we'll be on the doorstep of that $1 billion. >> Excellent. Rob, it's been a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for having theCUBE out here in London, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Coupa. Inspire 19 AMIA brought to you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London a Coupa inspire 19 please to walk to the cube for the first time. Mads think Jensen partner advisory firm. KPMG. NADHs welcome to the cube. >>Thank you Liza. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us. Lots of folks here in London for Coupa inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Guba talks about P IPE procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses. The procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today. What some of those waves of disruption are. >>Yeah, so you could say traditionally procurement has been very much about, you know, making agreements with suppliers. Uh, the business has have had an, uh, a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, uh, in many cases delaying projects. And, and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now. They expect, you know, from different back office functions including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a project, uh, in the business and you go to procurement asking for a specific surface service or product and procurement says, ah, this will take, you know, four to six months, that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now you could say transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. >>Eh, they have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could say. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations, they need to be much more predictive and understand what's going on both in the business but also in the market. And then you could say on the other hand, procurement, traditionally they do a contract and then they finalize the contract. And then they kind of keep the hands off. Yeah. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract, of course that's a a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operate, operationalize the contracts. So in terms of making sure that the users in in the business that they can actually use the contract and buy onto that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement and which also means that you will see now different operating models. You will see different interactions with businesses and will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >>I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say an incumbent, a chief procurement officer or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How in your advisory role do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function to be much more strategic and much more impactful to a business? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Kupa as a platform to, to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement. Eh, and, and actually we don't see a copayment implementation as an it implementation project. We see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that one thing is that you start changing the way that you're doing things, but it's also a mindset change. And the challenge here for, for CPO so far, procurement officers is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we are implementing solutions like Cooper is of course taking away all the transactional work that's automated. And we are also providing insight. So insight into spin, into to a transaction, to transaction processes, to turnaround times, to delivery, to, you know, all these kinds of things. And the, and the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people? >>And tell me how from KPMGs perspective, how is Kupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >>Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean Kubota's a technology, but it's also much more than a technology because as Cooper also emphasizes, it's also about a community. Yes. So the thing is that with a platform like Uber, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see eh spin patterns. So in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis, what their need will be. So in that way you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also you could see as a procurement person, as assaulting a manager or category innovators as Cooper's calling it, eh, you now have the insight to act. You think more strategic on your supplier, BS, on the marketing, on the market tendencies. You can see how other companies are procuring stuff. Are they going from one type of windows to another type of vendors and how is that going? So you could see Cuba is a tool not only to structure processes and to transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >>You mentioned the word predictive, it's not going to go. And one of the things that that will, the P and Kupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think the number was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there going helping a business in whatever industry it's in. Go from being reactive to proactive, to predictive. Is that a game changer or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >>Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry. There are many different ways of of looking at procurement, but a general thing across industries that, that that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods or pharmaceutical or whatever is that that the procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving because uh, you know, traditionally procurement, they are a little bit isolated. Like it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago didn't really understand what's going on in the business. In many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they are establishing contracts and things like that. But the thing is that if you don't understand your business and if you don't understand the way your business operates, you know you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. >>So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy. And then embrace innovation. Because, I mean, even though coop as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who knows what comes tomorrow. That will be a number of different things changing over the course of you know, two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way. Adapting, adapting, sorry. What the, what the company in general is adapting. >>So tell me a little bit, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >>Absolutely. So KPMG have developed a framework we call power procurement, which F which is a framework that gives, you could say clients are very, very structured way of doing a transformation. And that framework is actually built on top of the Cooper platform. So we have developed a model, which is you could say technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that a, that is placed on top of the Cooper platform where we utilize as a, you know, the possibilities that platform have. And one core thing is that the mantra of Cooper is is measurable business value and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get that measurable business value because how do you measure it? What is it that you want to measure? Is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Cooper platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way because you actually don't really think about technology. You think about business transformation and that's why I think you know, the way that we utilize this group as a platform is quite unique. >>So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier and on the industry side, when you look at that compared to you know your, your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be? To your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI or a technology. I want this to be simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >>Yeah, so it's a really good question actually because you could see in reality the value comes from a meaningful experience. And you could say traditionally when you have, you know, I was part of the mask organization, the Danish shipping company and eh, you know, we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could, you know, do the, execute the role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Kupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course it takes longer in a business environment you can say because also because you need to do a different sourcing exercises. They are regulations in the public safety and so forth. But in, in, in the way that you are thinking of how you procure and get access to the goods and services that you need for, for, for, you know, executing your role. It's a very different mindset and that's where technologies like Cooper comes in as you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >>So KPMG clearly has choice and who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Kupa and the partnership means to KPMG and the competitive differentiation it might deliver.. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean they are a number of different platforms in the market of course. And, and it's actually quite interesting these year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform. And uh, I can tell that both the suppliers and the market and the suppliers in general have changed quite a lot since then. And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that you know, the, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulty in following up with, with a company like Cooper. And you could see Cooper as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all, it adopts the cloud technology, which means that eh, companies doesn't have to think about, you know, maintenance operations, you know, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions. >>And, and it has this ability to create this community because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community. Yes. Which create, you could see a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competitive compete competing landscape. So in H in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Cooper works with the community and takes intelligence from the community. And based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >>Last question for you. The Mads, the category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define. What does that mean from Cape KPMGs perspective? >>Yeah, so so you could see for me it's actually quite eh relieving that eh, that those an actor in the market that that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a, it's a new term that the Cooper have introduced. I mean there have been variations on the, on the, on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this all, what this is all about. Because business spend management is much more, more than just the, you could say the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is a course as a huge part of it, but I mean they are expense management as an example. You have all the procurement staff, you have spinned in a lot of different areas, like a salary that's not kind of the part part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense. >>You could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas embrace business, spend management, and in in essence, you could see, I think Rob also mentioned it in a very good way. This is actually, it's the procurement department that managers, you know, a huge part of the value of the, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task the procurement, uh, organizations have. And the good thing is that we see increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >>Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the cube and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG a Kupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It was a pleasure to be here. Likewise for a Mads. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Kupa inspire London 19. Thanks for watching.

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Kupa inspire 19 PVR after you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Kupa inspire 19 please do welcome back to the cube Ravi talker, the SVP, a business acceleration that Cooper won't be welcome back. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. Likewise. So lots of, lots of buzz around us. Everyone's eating lunch, but there's a lot of folks here in London, a lot of exciting news coming out in this morning. Lot of customers and fused in Rob's keynote. I lost count of how many great customer examples were showed. Talk to us a little bit about Kupa pay and some of the innovations that you guys are delivering now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So pay pays a great new area for Coupa. We call it the fourth pillar and Rob's analogy of the pipe procurement, invoicing, payment and expenses. And so actually we started this journey a really last year at this event where we announced virtual card for purchase orders and a strategic relationship with Barclaycard. And over that past year we've done some amazing things with relationships with JP Morgan, Citibank, and we just announced a great relationship with American express to provide American express virtual cards on the Coupa pay platform. So we've been working hard at it. We've seen some really good success early success with customers. Uh, we announced some other great innovations in our Vegas conference just a few months ago where we announced invoice payments is generally available along with partnerships with Stripe and PayPal. So it's been really busy. >>It has been the B2B payments space. It's a big market, 1.2, I think trillion global and global volume. But it's also challenging because on the consumer side, on the BDC side, it's so easy for us to do transactions right on our phone, tablet watches, and we had this expectation that we can pay for anything. We can find anything, we can pay bills so easily. But on the B2B side there's a lot more complexity. The BDB hasn't, payments hasn't been able to innovate nearly as quickly as on the consumer side. But I'd love to get your thoughts on what is Cooper able to leverage with Coupa pay that's maybe going to start meeting some of the demands of those business folks who in their consumer lives have this expectation of a swipe or a click to do a transaction. >>Yeah, it's a completely different ball game consumer versus B2B, whole avenues around risk profiles of your suppliers. You know if you pay a supplier that's doing illegal business are doing place and where the government doesn't allow it puts your brand and your reputation at risk. Very serious risks. And so we incorporate a lot of what we do with the community. So you heard Rob talk about that in his keynote. A lot of things around community intelligence. So for us being able to rely on thousands of customers of data, millions of transactions, being able to see things across all of our customers and really create alerts and transactional efficiencies for our customers in B2B payments. That's a big change for our customers and we're just starting to get to see some of those transactional elements. I think the second thing that we've seen with B2B payments, and it's interesting money, 2020 is one of the largest, uh, payment conferences, uh, in the world. And it happened I think last week or the week before in Vegas. And this year has been a lot of talk about B2B payments, whereas last year is mostly B to C. and so we feel we've been making an impact in the entire payments area because to us it's bringing together all of the different payment rails, whether it's virtual card or bank transfers or cross border, but being able to do it across dozens and hundreds of countries and it global fashion. That's a big game changer for large enterprises. >>So one of the things that was a theme this morning during the keynote was trust. I had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Botsman trust expert who did a keynote this morning. And as we look at some of the numbers that Rob shared, you mentioned a few of over a thousand plus customers using Coupa. I think he's shared over 5 million suppliers on the platform. You talked about this community, this massive community that you are co creating with. Talk to me about Coupa pay and its ability to help deliver that trust so that Coupa can be that trusted advisor that it wants to be with. It's not just its customers but as partners too. >>No, absolutely. And Rachel's presentation this morning was fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, uh, my background actually I Kupa for a decade I ran customer success. So I engaged with C level executives at all of our customers. And as part of that process, a trust was a big factor in that when we said something we would deliver that. And over the course of the years that coop has been around about 1314 years we've held very true. That stands in our number one core value of ensuring customer success. And when you look at all of the customers that are willing to put their six, what we call success metrics, how much they've spent saved the spend that they have under management when they are publicly talking about it. That's trust that we've created with them in this partnership because they believe in what our ability to deliver says we decided to go into payments or we're trust and payments is a very big deal as mentioned earlier. Right? You don't get necessarily fired for screwing up our purchase order or an invoice, but if you send money to the wrong supplier to the wrong country, you know, there's a lot of risk associated with that. So we take that very, very seriously and how we've been developing and creating solutions around Kupa pay. And so it's just the overall Avenue that we work with our, we treat them as partners, not as a vendor supplier relationship. And because of that we have this mutual trust that we're both in this together in this large community. >>Yeah. And Rachel Botsman talk about sort of that balance between, uh, trust and risk. Yeah. Which was very interesting concept. Um, talk to me about, I'm just thinking like even from a fraud on a supplier perspective, one of the things I know that Cuba is able to do is alert a customer, Hey, there's a supplier that has a history of whatever it happens to me that's, that's my inflict risk on that customer. Tell me a little bit about that. From a trust risk kind of balanced perspective, what you guys are delivering there. >>It's a great area that we're just really starting to get into as well. And so being able to leverage the community of buyers and suppliers and having everything in a single code system code platform allows us to do a number of these things. And so for providing our customers, not the necessarily the, the exact thing that they should do, but providing them the relevant information in order for them to make the right decisions. Yeah. There's an old adage that I go by which is trust but verify. And so it's the same similar concept here. It's our goal to provide these prescriptions to our customers on what is the supplier doing or how can you improve your processes. And with these prescriptions, as Rob mentioned this morning, it's, it's up to our customers to choose what they want to do with those prescriptions. Sometimes they may take it, sometimes they may not >>and he gave a number, I want to say 22,000 prescriptions and he gave a time period in the past 12 months. That's what I thought as well. So a lot of insight literally coming out of that community. Love to chat though about the community in terms of the B2B payment space, not only we talked about how it's being influenced by consumers, but the changing role of procurement and finance. Yeah, a lot of just disruption there. We talked about that a few months ago and didn't get a lot of opportunity for financial leaders to become much more strategic and a lot of the examples that Rob shared showed how impactful company wide the impact that procurement folks, finance folks can make. Talk to me about how the Coupa is leveraging that community to help them get more visibility on how that procurement role is changing and how Coupa can help it be much more strategic. You know what I, that's a great question. And >>what I respond with that is, what's the name of our conference? It's inspire, right? We want to inspire this community to really go to that next level and really look deep inside themselves. It, Rob talks about all these different adjectives of Brown, all the different, what we call spend setters. It's a great initiative that we've created because we're giving our community of voice and that's always the biggest thing in how you affect change. How do you give people a voice? How do you give someone a story that they can grasp onto such that they can make it their own, such as they can take those facts and that relevance and apply it to their own day to day jobs. And that's a big thing that we're looking to do. But it requires going back to trust. It requires a little bit of trust in what we're doing. And by providing those stories, it gives these, our customers, our champions, uh, the ability to fall back on those, have that foundation for how to make change, how to disrupt their organizations. You know, Rob gave that great example of Telenor. You know, their seep, their chief procurement officer created a blueprint and a plan to provide mobile service. I think it was an India is a great example of what an individual can do and when you're that individual and you have visibility and tall your supply base into all of the spend going across your company, it's very, very powerful. >>I saw a survey that Cuba did recently have, I think 253 financial decision makers in the U K and some of the stats were quite shocking that 96% I believe said we do not have complete visibility over our entire spend. Right. Wow. Right. That's because one, some of the things that Rob shared this morning was the massive, massive savings that companies can achieve, but not having that visibility. You've got blinders on. There's a lot of risk there. There's a lot of expenses that probably should be going into procurement, but that was really 96% saying we don't have complete visibility. What's Cooper's answer to that? >>You know, it's, it's an interesting statistic. Right? And I, I gave a presentation I think seven, eight years ago, and I started off that presentation with saying, you know, if you are an HR and you didn't have track of all your employees, you'd be fired. If you're a head of sales and you didn't have an understanding of all of your open opportunities for business, you'd be fired. So why is that different for spend? Right? Why not have visibility and have access to all of the different spin that's happening across your company? And your Rob said it best in his keynote. We talked about what's actually happening in the world today. It's not necessarily around customer relationship management software, CRM, right? It's not necessarily around human capital management, but it's the well capitalized businesses of the world today. And today's day and age and this uncertainty of Brexit, uncertainty of the global climate, us, China trade relations, who's well capitalized to make and withstand what could be some, you know, unsettling times. Now there's another very interesting thing we saw with that same survey. Excuse me. Along with some of the things we saw with the wall street journal with some surveys we did with them, these finance professionals, they want to have that visibility and our answer to them come talk to us. >>So speaking of influence, inspiring, tell me a little bit about how the Coupa community influenced or is influencing the evolution of Coupa pay for example was Hey, we've got to have Amex virtual cards integrated with Coupa pay. Was that something that came from the voice of the community? Yeah, so we, >>you know, all across Koopa ever since the inception of the company, it's always around partnering with our customers, with our community to really listen and understand what they, what they're looking for. But doing it in the guy in the, within the framework of our core values as a customer, as a company. And the first one that I mentioned earlier, ensuring customer success. So we want to listen to our customers, we want to better understand them. So around virtual cards, you know, how do we choose to do an Amex or a Barclaycard? And to us it's actually pretty simple. We wanted to make sure that we're able to cover 80 to 90% of our customers with these large issuers. And we've been able to do that over the past year in negotiating these agreements, figuring out the technology components. And so we've been executing and delivering on that over the past, uh, over the past year. >>And if I understand that the press release correctly, KUKA pay with Amex virtual court integration is launching first in the UK and Australia. Correct. Can you tell me a little bit about those markets and what were some of the deciding factors? They said, Hey, well we'll go, we'll parlay on your title of acceleration. Is this, are these the right markets to launch and to accelerate copay? >>Yeah. Um, you know, there's obviously a lot of different ways and opportunities that American express has to go to market, massive company, great company to partner with. And so what we saw with them is from a technology standpoint, starting off in the UK and Australia made the most sense. We also have existing demand with customers that are ready to get going and really help us make sure that we create the right experience. You know, we expect this partnership to be really big and so as part of that, we want to make sure that we're able to deliver in certain markets first before we expand this and make this a much bigger thing. American express has a very prestigious brand. We want to respect and support that and we have our own brand that we want to support with our customers. We want to make sure we do it right. >>Well, Ravi, last question. I know that you're keynoting tomorrow. Yes. What are the couple of takeaways that you're going to leave the audience with tomorrow during your keynote? >>Yeah, it's a great, good question. I think the, the takeaways for tomorrow is we want to share some stories. You know, going back to inspiration, it's all about storytelling. Do we have stories to tell our customers such that they can relate to it and fall back on that? So we have three great customer speakers tomorrow. Really excited about the stories that they're going to share about Cooper pay and their journey with it. And my take away for our are the audiences. How do those stories relate to your business and is there a way that we can help you streamline your payment process? >>Awesome. Robbie, it's been a pleasure. You back on the cube. Best of luck at your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you at the next inspire. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. All right. For Ravi talker, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from London. Coupa inspire 19.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire'19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. (gentle music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire'19. Very pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, we have Dean Henry, the EVP of Business Financing and Supplier Management from American Express. Dean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So let's talk about payments. Those of us in our day lives as consumers, the B2C transactions, they're so easy these days, right? You can transact from your phone, from your watch. We're doing everything. We're paying bills, we're buying things. Yet in the B2B space, business payments haven't had as rapid as innovation, as we've seen on the consumer side. Talk to me a little bit about the business-to-business payments industry from AMEX's perspective, before we get in to what you guys are doing with Coupa. >> Yeah well, first comment on the innovation you're absolutely right. The innovation that's happening in retail payments, hasn't made it's way to B2B payments. I think that's mostly a function of a consumer having the ease to try something new. Download an app, and change the way that they transact a bit at a store. Or, a bit with whomever they're paying. Whereas, a big business has a lot of processes that drive their business spend. And the way that they manage it, and systems. As we're here talking with Coupa today, the processes that they automate, that they bring, are critical to making payments happen. Because of that, there's just barriers to entry, that make B2B payments harder to mirror the speed, that you see in the retail side. That said, there's a lot of exciting things happening. B2B payments is a $127 trillion market globally. It's a big profit pool that a lot of players are innovating in. And when you look into the landscape and you consider who's playing out there. There's the traditional big banks, that have been sort of the stalwarts of global payments. There's obviously a large and growing fintech community, with new companies everyday that are in the media, offering new capabilities to clients. And then there's players like American Express. And I think we're actually uniquely positioned in that landscape, with not too many exactly like us. And when you look at the big banks and some of the challenges that they have. When I talk to our customers about fees, and processes that take awhile. Or money that moves with relative uncertainty, in terms of, how much is actually going to show up in the beneficiary's account, based on lifting fees, as money moves between banks. And then you look at the fintech community. That's new innovative solutions, but you're not sure that they're always going to be around, after the next funding cycle. I think we're trying to play in the middle. Where we're a great alternative to the fintech community. We're a global platform for payments. We're a global platform for lending. So we can really do all the things that a fintech can do. All the things that a bank can do, in many instances. And do that with the brand, and the certainty, that is AMEX. So we're excited about the space. And we're investing a lot of time, and energy. And partnering where we need to, in order to make sure our customers can transact where they want us to help them facilitate commerce. >> Right, that point of enabling a customer to transact where they want. What influences are you, is American Express, seeing and being able to infuse into your partnerships, from the consumer side? From that consumer who buys something with a click, or a swipe on Amazon, and wants to be able to do something similar, in their business day job. Tell me about the influence that American Express is seeing. And what that position that you just described, is allowing you guys to say, all right this is the direction that we're going to go in. Because we know we need to meet you, Mr. Customer, where you are. >> Right, well look I think part of it is demographics to be perfectly honest with you. Look at Gen Y, and Gen Z. They're more of the decision makers in today's management. They will be even more in tomorrow's management. And so they, to your point, have that expectation that their business life shouldn't be that much more complex, than their personal life. So, what we're trying to do is find the partners that have the best user experience. And make sure our solutions work seamlessly there. That's step one, that's what we're doing here with Coupa. Step two, is we're also trying to make sure that our capabilities on Amex, a digital real estate works just as easily as a our retail side of our business. And we're doing that with the unifying principles of American Express, which is the trust, and the service, and the brand that we offer to our clients. But then, also the merchant rewards. So there's a rich history of American Express providing a differentiated value proposition, with the credit card rewards that exist. And we take that capability into our business relationships, and make sure that it's a value add to those customers that want it. >> So let's talk about what American Express is doing with Coupa. What was just announced with Coupa Pay? >> So yeah, Coupa Pay, I was impressed by the stats that Rob put up there. They're growing quickly, and we want to be part of it. We're candidly following the requests of our clients who want American Express, as a payment option inside Coupa Pay. We offer a tremendous value prop inside of Coupa Pay. The data that flows with a payment, the data that we're able to collect, that differentiates us from our competition. Helps our clients reconcile their payments, eliminate the paper, realize the efficiencies that Coupa's clients are excited about. And so, we're there simply enabling American Express to be a payment option. And my hope, and I think Coupa's hope, is that that's step one of a partnership. And we'll be able to do more together, to serve our collective clients. >> So this is enabling American Express virtual cards to be available as a payment option, within Coupa Pay? >> Dean: Yes. >> And what is a virtual card? >> So a virtual card is a virtual credit card number. It can be a one-time use, or multi-use. >> Okay. >> Our clients use it for several different reasons. Buyers of goods use a virtual card, in order to make the payment of a supplier easier. To get more data, along with the transaction, so that they can reconcile a payment to a purchase order, and to associated invoices. The suppliers get benefit as well. In that, they too get enhanced data to reconcile a payment, that they receive on their end. There's also working capital benefit. In that, if a buyer chooses to pay early an invoice, we can extend financing, and pay the supplier earlier. So that they have more working capital to operate their business. So it's a real balanced value prop, where both parties are realizing value. >> Is this going to enable a buyer to have benefits, like increased security, with the way the virtual card works? >> Increase security, in so far as a virtual card is encrypted. The fact that American Express stands behind all of our card payments, with our brand and our promise. That differentiates from a traditional bank payment. You know ACH, and other low value clearings, that don't have those guarantees along with it. So that is a big differentiator. But I think candidly, the biggest benefit our clients see is the enhanced data, and the working capital. I think that's where we're trying to enrich both sides of the transaction. Give more data to enable the automation that's happening in the industry. And extend credit, so that businesses can operate more efficiently. And buy the things they need to buy. And hire the people they need to hire. >> Is this also something that will give suppliers, and buyers, more visibility? You talk about enhanced data. Will they now have more visibility over buyers, like different supplier options? Or suppliers, with different ways that they can get paid? >> So certainly, enhanced visibility on when a supplier is getting paid. And relative to the invoice date. And what we're trying to do is work with Coupa, and work with our partners around, well how do we enhance the data so that as Coupa talks about the community of suppliers, that their buyers utilize. How can we be part of that? How do we support the buyers in making decisions? The suppliers in utilizing American Express as a source to be a verified business, that has gone through all the legal checks, that are required in commerce. And bring both of those capabilities, to a transaction on the Coupa network. >> One of the stats that Rob mentioned this morning. I love stats, I really geek out over them, I don't know why. He said there's five million plus suppliers on the Coupa platform. Is that an advantage, that American Express sees, to help extend the footprint of your virtual cards? >> Absolutely, what I'm candidly more excited about is the millions, and millions, of suppliers that are on the American Express network. And that's an asset that I see personally, as something that we can work with Coupa, and other partners, to bring the businesses that are already verified. That are on our network, that we personally talk to every year. And bring those verified profiles to the commerce networks, like Coupa, so that it's easier to transact on Coupa, if you have an American Express card. >> Got it, and then last question for you is if we look at this partnership, what was announced today, this is launching in the UK and Australia first. And then, you'll roll it out more globally. Can you tell me a little bit about why those two regions? When that's going to be available for customers to use? >> So the honest answer is we wanted to be fast to market, quick out to our customer base. The UK and Australia, are two very important geographies for us. So we're launching first in those places, by the end of the year. And then, looking at rolling out in the US in early 2020. And then, from there expanding alongside Coupa globally. >> Tell me, as we're sitting here in London. Some of the interesting things going on, it's a lot of geopolitical challenges. Everybody knows about Brexit, and the election coming up, on the 12th of December. Tell me a little more about the UK market for American Express. What were some of the market dynamics that Amex said, hey there's an opportunity here for, I'll use a word that Coupa uses, acceleration, like accelerated time to market. Give me a little more about that. >> Yeah I mean candidly, like the geopolitics haven't really played into our launch. But the UK has been a strong market for Amex, for a very, very long time. Brighton, where we have a very big presence with the local football team in Brighton. That's just a metaphor for the broader extension, and client base, and employee presence that we have here. And so we wanted to make a big partnership announcement, in an important place. And the UK felt like the right market to do it in. >> Excellent, well Dean thank you for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. Sharing what's new, with Amex and Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. >> Oh excellent. For Dean Henry, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE! Covering Coupa Insp!re'19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re'19. Can you hear all the buzz around me? You probably can hear it, it's electric. The keynote just ended, and I'm very pleased to welcome, fresh from the keynote stage, we have Rachel Botsman, author and trust expert from Oxford University. Rachel, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you for having me. >> Your talk this morning about the intersection of trust and technology, to say it's interesting is an understatement. You had some great examples where you showed some technology brands, that we all know, and have different relationships with: Uber, Facebook, and Amazon. And the way that you measured the audience is great, you know, clap the brand that you trust the most. And it was so interesting, because we expect these technology brands to, they should be preserving our information, but we've also seen recent history, some big examples, of that trust being broken. >> Rachel: Yeah, yeah. >> Talk to us about your perspectives. >> So what I thought was interesting, well kind of unexpected for me, was no one clapped for Facebook, not one person in the room. And this is really interesting to me, because the point that I was making is that trust is really, really contextual, right? So if I had said to people, do you trust on Facebook that you can find your friends from college, they probably would've clapped. But do I trust them with my data, no. And this distinction is so important, because if you lose trust in one area as a company or a brand, and it can take time, you lose that ability to interact with people. So our relationship and our trust relationship with brands is incredibly complicated. But I think, particular tech brands, what they're realizing is that, how badly things go wrong when they're in a trust crisis. >> Talk to me about trust as a currency. You gave some great examples this morning. Money is the currency for transactions, where trust is the currency of interactions. >> Yeah, well I was trying to frame things, not because they sound nice, but how do you create a lens where people can really understand, like what is the value of this thing, and what is the role that it plays? And I'm never going to say money's not important; money is very important. But people can understand money; people value money. And I think that's because it has a physical, you can touch it, and it has an agreed value, right? Trust I actually don't believe can be measured. Trust is, what is it? It's something there, there's a connection between people. So you know when you have trust because you can interact with people. You know when you have trust because you can place their faith in them, you can share things about yourself and also share things back. So it's kind of this idea that, think of it as a currency, think of it as something that you should really value that is incredibly fragile in any situation in any organization. >> How does a company like Coupa, or an Amazon or a Facebook, how do they leverage trust and turn it into a valuable asset? >> Yeah, I don't like the idea that you sort of unlock trust. I think companies that really get it right are companies that think day in and day out around behaviors and culture. If you get behaviors and culture right, like the way people behave, whether they have empathy, whether they have integrity, whether you feel like you can depend on them, trust naturally flows from that. But the other thing that often you find with brands is they think of trust as like this reservoir, right? So it's different from awareness and loyalty; it's not like this thing that, you can have this really full up battery which means then you can launch some crazy products and everyone will trust it. We've seen this with like, Mattel, the toy brand. They launched a smart system for children called Aristotle, and within six months they had to pull it because people didn't trust what it was recording and watching in people's bedrooms. We were talking about Facebook and the cryptocurrency Libra, their new smart assistants; I wouldn't trust that. Amazon have introduced smart locks; I don't know if you've seen these? >> Lisa: Yes. >> Where if you're not home, it's inconvenient for a very annoying package slip. So you put in an Amazon lock and the delivery person will walk into your home. I trust Amazon to deliver my parcels; I don't trust them to give access to my home. So what we do with the trust and how we tap into that, it really depends on the risk that we're asking people to take. >> That's a great point that you bring about Amazon, because you look at how they are infiltrating our lives in so many different ways. There's a lot of benefits to it, in terms of convenience. I trust Amazon, because I know when I order something it's going to arrive when they say it will. But when you said about trust being contextual and said do you trust that Amazon pays their taxes, I went wow, I hadn't thought of it in that way. Would I want to trust them to come into my home to drop off a package, no. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> But the, I don't know if I want to say infiltration, into our lives, it's happening whether we like it or not. >> Well I think Amazon is really interesting. First of all because so often as consumers, and I'm guilty, we let convenience trump trust. So we talk about trust, but, you know what, like, if I don't really trust that Uber driver but I really want to get somewhere, I'll get in the car, right? I don't really trust the ethics of Amazon as a company or like what they're doing in the world, but I like the convenience. I predict that Amazon is actually going to go through a major trust crisis. >> Lisa: Really? >> Yeah. The reason why is because their trust is largely, I talked about capability and character. Amazon's trust is really built around capability. The capability of their fulfillment centers, like how efficient they are. Character wobbles, right? Like, does Bezos have integrity? Do we really feel like they care about the bookshops they're eating up? Or they want us to spend money on the right things? And when you have a brand and the trust is purely built around capability and the character piece is missing, it's quite a precarious place to be. >> Lisa: I saw a tweet that you tweeted recently. >> Uh oh! (laughs) >> Lisa: On the difference between capability and character. >> Yes, yeah. >> Lisa: And it was fascinating because you mentioned some big examples, Boeing. >> Yes. >> The two big air disasters in the last year. Facebook, obviously, the security breach. WeWork, this overly aggressive business model. And you said these companies are placing the blame, I'm not sure if that's the right word-- >> No no, the blame, yeah. >> On product or service capabilities, and you say it really is character. Can you talk to our audience about the difference, and why character is so important. >> Yeah, it's so interesting. So you know, sometimes you post things. I actually post more on LinkedIn, and suddenly like, you hit a nerve, right? Because I don't know, it's something you're summarizing that many people are feeling. And so the point of that was like, if you look at Boeing, Theranos was another example, WeWork, hundreds of banks, when something goes wrong they say it was a flaw in the product, it was a flaw in the system, it's a capability problem. And I don't think that's the case. Because the root cause of capability problems come from character and culture. And so, capability is really about the competence and reliability of someone or a product or service. Character is how someone behaves. Character gets to their intentions and motives. Character gets to, did they know about it and not tell us. Even VW is another example. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So it's not the product that is the issue. And I think we as consumers and citizens and customers, where many companies get it wrong in a trust crisis is they talk about the product fix. We won't forgive them, or we won't start giving them our trust again until we really believe something's changed about their character. I'm not sure anything has changed with Facebook's culture and character, which is why they're struggling with every move that they take, even though their intentions might be good. That's not how people in the world are viewing them. >> Do you think, taking Boeing as an example, I fly a lot, I'm sure you do as well. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> When those accidents happened, I'm sure everybody, including myself, was checking, what plane is this? >> Rachel: Yeah. >> Because when you know, especially once data starts being revealed, that demonstrated pilots, test pilots, were clearly saying something isn't right here, why do you think a company like Boeing isn't coming out and addressing that head on from an integrity perspective? Do you think that could go a long way in helping their brand reputation? >> I never, I mean I do get it, I'm married to a lawyer so I understand, legal gets involved, governance gets involved, so it's like, let's not disclose that. They're so worried about the implications. But it's this belief they can keep things hidden. It's a continual pattern, right? And that they try to show empathy, but really it comes across as some weird kind of sympathy. They don't really show humility. And so, when the CEO sits there, I have to believe he feels the pain of the human consequence of what happened. But more importantly, I have to believe it will never happen again. And again, it's not necessarily, do I trust the products Boeing creates, it's do I trust the people? Do I trust the decisions that they're making? And so it's really interesting to watch companies, Samsung, right? You can recover from a product crisis, with the phones, and they kind of go away. But it's much harder to recover from what, Boeing is a perfect example, has become a cultural crisis. >> Right, right. Talk to us about the evolution of trust. You talked about these three waves. Tell our audience about that, and what the third wave is and why we're in it, benefits? And also things to be aware of. >> Yes! (laughs) I didn't really talk about this today, because it's all about inspiration. So just to give you a sense, the way I think about trust is three chapters of human history. So the first one is called local trust; all running around villages and communities. I knew you, I knew your sister, I knew whoever was in that village. And it was largely based on reputation. So, I borrowed money from someone I knew, I went to the baker. Now this type of trust, it was actually phenomenally effective, but we couldn't scale it. So when we wanted to trade globally, the Industrial Revolution, moving to cities, we invented what I call institutional trust. And that's everything from financial systems to insurance products, all these mechanisms that allow trust to flow on a different level. Now what's happening today, it's not those two things are going away and they're not important; they are. It's that what technology inherently does, particularly networks, marketplaces, and platforms, is it takes this trust that used to be very hierarchical and linear, we used to look up to the CEO, we used to look up to the expert, and it distributes it around networks and platforms. So you can see that at Coupa, right? And this is amazing because it can unlock value, it can create marketplaces. It can change the way we share, connect, collaborate. But I think what's happened is that, sort of the idealism around this and the empowerment is slightly tinged, in a healthy way, realizing a lot can go wrong. So distributed trust doesn't necessarily mean distributed responsibility. My biggest insight from observing many of these communities is that, we like the idea of empowerment, we like the idea of collaboration, and we like the idea of control, but when things go wrong, they need a center. Does that make sense? >> Lisa: Absolutely, yes. >> So, a lot of the mess that we're seeing in the world today is actually caused by distributed trust. So when I like, read a piece of information that isn't from a trusted source and I make a decision to vote for someone, just an example. And so we're trying to figure out, what is the role of the institution in this distributed world? And that's why I think things have got incredibly messy. >> It certainly has the potential for that, right? Looking at, one of the things that I also saw that you were talking about, I think it was one of your TED Talks, is reputation capital. And you said you believe that will be more powerful than credit history in the 21st century. How can people, like you and I, get, I want to say control, over our reputation, when we're doing so many transactions digitally-- >> Rachel: I know. >> And like I think you were saying in one of your talks, moving from one country to another and your credit history doesn't follow you. How can somebody really control their trust capital and creative positive power from it? >> They can't. >> They can't? Oh no! >> I don't want to disappoint you, but there's always something in a TED speech that you wish you could take out, like 10 years later, and be like, not that you got it wrong, but that there's a naivety, right? So it is working in some senses. So what is really hard is like, if I have a reputation on Airbnb, I have a reputation on Amazon, on either side of the marketplace, I feel like I own that, right? That's my value, and I should be able to aggregate that and use that to get a loan, or get a better insurance, because it's a predictor of how I behave in the future. So I don't believe credit scores are a good predictor of behavior. That is very hard to do, because the marketplaces, they believe they own the data, and they have no incentive to share the reputation. So believe me, like so many companies after, actually it was wonderful after that TED Talk, many tried to figure out how to aggregate reputation. Where I have seen it play out as an idea, and this is really very rewarding, is many entrepreneurs have taken the idea and gone to emerging markets, or situations where people have no credit history. So Tala is a really good example, which is a lending company. Insurance companies are starting to look at this. There's a company called Traity. Where they can't get a loan, they can't get a product, they can't even open a bank account because they have no traditional credit history. Everyone has a reputation somewhere, so they can tap into these networks and use that to have access to things that were previously inaccessible. So that's the application I'm more excited about versus having a trust score. >> A trust score that we would be able to then use for our own advantages, whether it's getting a job, getting a loan. >> Yeah, and then unfortunately what also happened was China, and God forbid that I in any way inspired this decision, decided they would have a national trust score. So they would take what you're buying online and what you were saying online, all these thousands of interactions, and that the government would create a trust score that would really impact your life: the schools that your children could go to, and there's a blacklist, and you know, if you jaywalk your face is projected and your score goes down. Like, this is like an episode of Black Mirror. >> It's terrifying. >> Yeah. >> There's a fine line there. Rachel, I wish we had more time, because we could keep going on and on and on. But I want to thank you-- >> A pleasure. >> For coming right from the keynote stage to our set; it was a pleasure to meet you. >> On that dark note. >> Yes! (laughing) For Rachel Botsman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re London '19. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

(electronic music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We're here with a special session in London, we've been following the career of Teresa Carlson around, we asked, "hey, can we come to London to your headquarters there and interview some of the leaders and some of the startups and innovators both in public sector and commercial?" Andy Isherwood is here, he's the managing director of AWS EMEA. Andy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, thank you very much for your time. >> So you're about a year in, so that's plenty of time to get acclimated, what are your impressions of AWS and then we'll get into the market? >> Yeah, so it's nearly a year and a half actually, so time definitely goes pretty quickly. So I'd say it's pretty different, I'd say probably a couple of things kind of jump out at me. One is, I think we just have a startup mentality in everything we do. So, y'know, if you think about everything we do kind of works back from the customer and we really feel like a kind of startup at heart. And we always say, y'know, within the organization, we should also make it feel like day one. If we get to day two, y'know, the game's over. So we always try and make day one something that's kind of relevant in what we're doing. I think the second thing is customer obsession. I think we are truly customer obsessed. And you could say that most organizations actually say, y'know, they're customer obsessed. I'd say we're truly customer obsessed in everything we do so if you think about our re:Invent program, if you think about, y'know, London, the summit coming up, what you will notice is that there will be customers everywhere, speaking about their experiences and that's really important. So we start with the customer and we always work back. So super important that we never forget that and if you think about how we develop our services, they start with the customer. We don't go out like a product company would and make great products and sell them. We start with the customer, work back, develop the solutions and then let the customer use them, and we iterate on those developments. So I'd say it's pretty different in those two aspects. I'd say the other thing is, it's just hugely relevant. Every customer I go into, and I've seen hundreds of customers in the last year and a half, were hugely relevant. Y'know, we are at the heart of what people want to do and need to do, which makes it important. >> Yeah, so we've been following the career of Andy Jassy for years and we've learnt about the Working Backwards documents, certainly you guys are raising the bar all the time, is sort of the mantra, and yeah, customer centricity, you said it's different, y'know, we do over a hundred events every year and every company out there talks about, "we're focused on the customer", but what makes AWS different? >> I think it's the fact that we truly listen and work back from the customer. So, y'know, we're not a product company, we don't make products with great R&D people and then take them and sell them. We don't obsess about the competition, y'know, we start with the customer, we go and speak to the customer, I think we listen intently to what they need, and we help them look round corners. We help them think about what they need to do for them to be successful, then we work back and probably 90% of what we do is fundamentally developed from those insights that the customer gives us. That's quite different. That really is a working back methodology. >> We run most of our business on AWS and it's true, so I remember we were in a meeting with Andy Jassy one time and he started asking us how we use the platform and what we like about it and don't like about it, and my business partner, John Furrier, he's kind of our CTO, he starts rattling off a number of things that he wanted to see, and Andy pulls out his pad and he starts writing it down, and he was asking questions back and forth, so I think I've seen that in action. One of the things that we've observed is that the adoption of cloud in EMEA and worldwide is pretty consistent and ubiquitous, there's not like a big gap, y'know, you used to see years later, y'know, Europe would maybe adopt a technology and you're seeing actually in many cases, you certainly see it with mobile, you're seeing greater advancements. GDPR, obviously, is a template for privacy, what are you seeing in Europe in terms of some of the major trends of cloud adoption? >> Yeah, I don't think we're seeing major differences, y'know, people talk a lot about, "well, Europe must be two years behind North America" in terms of adoption. We don't see that, I think it is slightly slower in some countries, but I don't think that's kind of common across the piste. So I'd say that the adoption, and if you think back to some customers that were very early adopters, just from an overall global cloud perspective, companies like Shell, for example, y'know they were really early adopters, and those were European-based companies, you could say they're global companies, absolutely, but a lot of what they did was developed in Europe. So I would say that there are countries that are slower to adopt, sometimes driven by the fact that, y'know, security is an issue, or was an issue, that data sovereignty was a bigger issue for some of these countries. But I think all of those are pretty much passed now, so I think we are very quickly kind of catching up with regards to the North American market. So, yeah. >> You mentioned your sort of startup mentality, you mentioned BP. Is it divisions within a large company like that that are startup-like? Is that what you're seeing in terms of the trends? >> No, I'm seeing three patterns. So I'm seeing a pattern which is, y'know, large organizations that go all-in very quickly, typically, y'know, strong leadership, clear vision, need to move quickly. >> Dave Vellante: We're going cloud? >> Yeah, we're going cloud, and we're going all in and that may be, like an NL would be a great example. So NL's a really good example of a top-down approach, very progressive CIO, very clear-thinking CEO that's driven adoption. So I'd say that's pattern one. For me, pattern two is where large organizations create an entity alongside, so almost a separate business. So probably Openbank is probably a good example, part of Santander. And now that organization has about one and a half million customers, obviously started in Spain, but they built a digital bank, clearly tapping into all of the data and customer sets within Santander, but building an experience which is fundamentally different. >> So a skunkworks that really grew and grew? >> Correct, absolutely, a skunkworks that grew, but grew quickly and now it's becoming y'know, a key part of their business. And then the third area, or the third pattern for me is very much a kind of a bottoms-up-led approach. So this is where the developers basically love the services that we have, they use the services, they typically put them on their credit card or AMEX, and then they'll go and use the services and create real value. That value is then seen and it snowballs. So those are kind of the three patterns. I'd say the only outlier to those three patterns is a startup organization, and as you know we've been hugely successful with startups, from, y'know, Pinterest, to Uber, to Careem, to all of these organizations and those organizations it's really important to influence them early on, to make sure that they are aware, and the developer community and the founders are aware of what we can do and we have a number of programs to really help them do that. And they start to use our services, and as those organizations are successful then our business grows alongside them and they, y'know, typically start to use a lot more of the services. >> One of the defining patterns of three, the bottoms-up and four, the start-ups, is they code infrastructure. And, y'know, sometimes the one, the top-down may not have the skillsets and the disciplines and the structure to do that. What are you seeing in terms of that whole programmable infrastructure, the skillsets, programmers essentially coding the infrastructure? Are you seeing CIOs come in and say, "Okay, we need to re-skill", are they bringing in new staff, kind of like number two, the Openbank example might be, y'know, some rockstars that they wanna sort of assign to the skunkwork. How is the number one category dealing with that in terms of their digital transformation? >> Yeah, so y'know, skills is something that is critically important, having the right skills in the right place at the right time. And if you think about Europe it's a big outsourced market, so a lot of those skills were outsourced typically to a lot of the outsourcing companies, as you'd expect. What you're seeing now is organizations, BP's a good example of this, where they're building the innovation capability back into their organizations to make sure that they can create the offerings and create the user experience and create the business models for the new world. And what we're doing is really trying to make sure that we're enabling those organizations to build the skills. So probably at a number of different levels, kind of, y'know, very basic level, or at a very junior level we're kind of influencing people in schools. So, y'know, we're going to be announcing, or announcing at the summit, Guess IT, which is basically a program to train up year eight students. So you start there, and basically you go all the way through to offering training and certification, we have a very big function associated with that to make sure that we're building the right skills for organizations to be successful, and also then working with partners, so all of those training and certification skills, we are working with the partners like the Cloudreaches of this world, but also the DXCs of this world, the Accentures of this world, the Atoses of this world, really to make sure that they have the right skills and capability, not only around our services but around the movement to cloud which is what these organizations need to do to help them innovate. >> And it sounds like your customers wanna learn how to fish, they see that as IP, in a sense, still work with partners, but help them transfer that knowledge and then, y'know, continue to innovate, raise the bars, as we like to say. >> Yes, yes. >> One of the biggest challenges that we see, we talk to customers all the time, is the data challenge. Particularly companies that have been around for a while, they have a lot of technical debt, the data's locked into these hardened silos, obviously I'm sure you see that as a challenge, maybe can you address that, how you're helping customers deal with that challenge and some of the other things that you see cloud addressing? >> Yeah, so y'know, we're really trying to help customers be successful in doing what they do in the timescale that they're setting themselves, and we're helping them be successful. I think from a data point of view, we have a lot of capability, so just to give you a perspective, so since I've been here that year and a half, we started with 125 services. That number of services has gone to 170-odd services now and the innovation that we have within those services has now reached, I think last year, just over the 1900 level so this is iterations on the product. In addition to that, we are continually building new offerings, so if you think about our database strategy, y'know, it's very much to create databases that customers can use in the right way at the right time to do the right job and that's just not one database, it's a number of different databases tuned for specific needs. So we have 14 databases, for example, which are really geared to make customers use the right database at the right time to achieve the right outcome, and we think that's really important, so that's helping people basically use their data in a different way. Obviously our S3, our core storage offering is critically important and hugely successful. We think that as-is, the bedrock for how people think about their data and then they expand and use data lakes, and then underpinning that is making sure that they've got the right databases to support and use that data effectively. >> At the start of this millennium there was like a few databases, databases was a boring marketplace and now it's exploded, as Inova says, dozens a minute it's actually amazing >> Yep >> how much innovation there is occurring in that space. What's your vision for AWS in EMEA? >> Yeah, so you know the overall Amazon vision is to be the world's most customer-obsessed organization, so y'know, here in EMEA, that holds true, so y'know, we start with the customer, we work back, and we wanna make sure that every single customer's happy with what we're doing. I think the second thing is making sure that we are bringing and enabling customers to be innovative. This is really important to us, and it's really important to the customers that we sell to, y'know, there's many insurgents kind of attacking historic business models, it's really important that we give all of the organizations the ability to use technology, whether they're a small company or a big company. And we call that the democratization of IT, we're making things available that were only available to big companies a while back. Now, we have made those services available to pretty much every single company, whether you're a startup in garage, y'know, to a large global organization. So that's really important that we bring and we continue to democratize IT to make it available for the masses, so that they can go out there and innovate and do what ultimately, customers wanna do, y'know, customers want people to innovate. Customers want a different experience. And it's important that we give organizations the tools and the wherewithal to go and do that. >> Well you've been in the industry long enough, and you've worked at product companies prior to this part of your career, and you know the innovation engine used to be Moore's Law. It used to be how fast can I take advantage of that curve, and that's totally changed now. You see a number of things happening, it's get rid of the heavy lifting, so you can focus on your business, that's what cloud does for you, but it's kind of this combination, the cocktail of data, plus machine intelligence, and then the cloud brings scale, it attracts innovative companies. How do you see, first of all do you buy that sort of new cocktail, and how do you see customers applying that innovation engine? >> Yeah, y'know, to answer the first bit first, we definitely see that cocktail. So y'know, the kind of undifferentiated work that was historically done to kind of build servers and make sure that they ran and all of those things, people don't need to do that now. We do that really really effectively. So they can really focus their time, attention, their money, their efforts, their innovation, on creating new experiences, new products, new offerings, for their customers. And they should also work back from customers themselves and work out what's really required. Every single business model, every single offering, needs to be questioned, by every single organization and I think that's what we do. We give the ability to organizations to really think differently about how they use what we have to do the really important things, the things that differentiate them and the things that ultimately give customers a different experience. And that's why I think we've seen so many very successful companies, y'know, from Airbnb, to Pinterest, to Uber. It's giving people a fundamentally different experience and that's what people want, so y'know, we're here to I think give people the ability to create those different experiences. >> Kind of amazing when you go back and you remember the book Does IT Matter? the Havard Business Review famous... It couldn't have been more wrong, at the same time it couldn't have been more right because it really underscored that IT was broken and that preceded 2006 introduction of EC2 and now technology matters more than ever before, every company's a technology company, y'know, you hear Marc Bennioff talk about software's eating the world, it's so true, and so as companies become technology companies, what's your advice to them? I mean obviously you gotta say, "Let us handle the heavy lifting," but what do they have to do to succeed in their digital transformation in your view? >> Yeah, I think it's about changing the mindset and changing the culture of organizations. So I think you can try and instill new processes and new tools on an organization but fundamentally you've gotta change the culture and I think we have to create and enable cultures to be created that are innovative and that requires, I think, a very different mindset. That requires a mindset which is about, "we don't mind if you fail". Y'know, and we'll applaud failure. We in Amazon have had many failures but it's applauded, and if it's applauded, people try again so they'll dust themselves off and they'll move on. You can see this in Israel which is, y'know, very much a startup nation. You can see people start a business, they might fail. Next day, they start a new one. So I think it's having this culture of innovation that allows people to experiment. Experimentation's good, but it's also prone to failure. But, y'know, out of 10 experiments you're gonna get one that's successful. That one could be the make or break for your organization to move forward, and give customers what they actually need, so, y'know, super important. >> Break things, move fast, right? >> Exactly. >> I love it. All right, what should we expect tomorrow at the London summit? We gotta big crowd coming, it's at the ExCeL Center >> Yeah, I think you'll see us continue to innovate, I think you'll see a lot of people, and I think you'll see a lot of customers talk about their experience and share their experience, y'know, these are learning summits, y'know, they're not kind of show and tell, they're very much about explaining what other customers are doing, how people can use the innovation and you'll see lots of experiences from different customers that people will be able to take away and learn from and go back to their offices and do similar things, but probably in a different way. So, y'know there'll be lots of exciting announcements, as you saw from re:Invent, we continue to innovate at a fair clip, as I said, 1950-odd innovations, y'know, significant releases last year, so not surprisingly you'll see a few of those. >> These summits are like mini re:Invents, aren't they? And as you said, Andy, very customer-focused, customer-centric; a lot of customer content. So, Andy Isherwood, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was really great to have you. >> Great >> All right. >> Thank you >> You're welcome Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellente, you're watching theCUBE.