Cloud demonstrates a silver lining for Financial Services organisations looking to improve supply chain collaboration 

A shift in thinking across the financial services sector, embracing the advantages of private cloud software delivery, has seen leading eProcurement software provider Wax Digital pick up six new clients in the sector in the last six months, including three high street banks and a building society.

Five of those six organisations have made major investments in Purchase to Pay or Source to Pay technology, designed to offer a consumer shopping experience to hundreds of employees that need to raise requests for goods and services, from marketing material to temporary staff and all things in between.

The Wax Digital web3 platform makes it easy for those employees to build shopping baskets, code them to the correct budgets and account codes, get them properly authorised and then issue purchase orders automatically to suppliers. Goods receipting, invoice matching and workflow are all handled intuitively within web3, seamlessly integrated with the organisation’s core financial systems.

Daniel Ball, Business Development Director at Wax Digital comments: “It’s great to see major institutions in this space looking to address procurement process efficiencies as part of their recovery from what has been a challenging few years.

They are increasingly looking to implement nimble, user-friendly web-based systems to drive compliance and cost savings and to help them collaborate more effectively, both internally and with their suppliers.

And what has been really important in facilitating that move to intuitive cloud systems is a demonstrable commitment to security and process compliance that is at the level required to deal with bank data in the cloud. We’ve implemented security protocols that go far beyond what most providers in this space are capable of, whilst accreditations for ISO9001, Cyber Security Plus, and shortly ISO27001 demonstrate our commitment to process rigour.”

While some of these financial services clients are new to eProcurement and electronic sourcing, a number of them have defected from systems provided by other vendors in the space such as SAP (Ariba) and Oracle, citing issues with usability, adoption and support as key factors in their decision.

Daniel Ball continues: “A highly intuitive interface is key – it’s often what sets best of breed solutions so far apart from the finance-system alternative. We continually invest in web3 to take forward its user experience, from the basics to blue sky innovation like Google Glass. If we can make users love the system from the outset then the adoption battle is already won.”

Rob Skinner, Skout
wax@skoutpr.com

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