Coupa Pay: Solution Overview — 2020 Update

For most companies, supplier payments represent 80% of total payments (internal and external). Payments include intercompany payments and payments to third party vendors. While there is no “typical” company, many larger enterprises operate multiple legal entities (think sales offices, factories, distribution centers located globally), with multiple banks, and hundreds of banks accounts. Tens of thousands of vendors, suppliers, gig workers and employees must be paid globally. It is messy, to say the least!

The payments function is, still, generally, a largely unautomated backwater. Some of the most (comparative) manual processes within finance and procurement still exist around generating supplier payments and handling different payment types. The challenge of doing this with multiple bank relationships and multiple disbursement accounts, while making sure the company has an updated view of its cash position via current payables information further complicates (and slows) activities.

For these reasons, B2B payment has become a very hot topic. So it’s no surprise that Coupa, a source-to-pay suite provider of business spend management solutions, is interested in carving out its share of the opportunity. But Coupa is not alone. Whether it be real-time fraud detection, applying APIs to bank connectivity or facilitating cross-border payments, there is no shortage of investment by numerous fintech vendors to help companies become more efficient with their payments.

But probably nowhere is there a bigger interest than managing payments in a unified single interface, across multiple channels, banks, rails, and to handle both domestic and cross-border payments to suppliers, contractors and employees while performing real-time fraud detection to stop payments before they are made — reducing dependence of after-the-fact payment recovery processes. This is where Coupa’s vision comes into play with its Coupa Pay offering.

From a procurement and AP lens, Spend Matters PRO has covered Coupa Pay before. See:

• Coupa Pay: Solution Review and Analysis [PRO]
• Beyond ‘Not OK-2-Pay’: A Coupa Pay Update from Inspire 2019 [PRO]

Today, we'll focus not only on updating our coverage of Coupa Pay to reflect the latest release capabilities as of Q2 2020, but also provide a perspective on the solution from the lens of the finance organization, especially account payables, which is tasked with much of the complex orchestration of B2B payments.