Zip’s inaugural Forward Europe

Zip’s inaugural Forward Europe took place in the heart of London at Convene 22 Bishopsgate, bringing together procurement and finance leaders to explore how modern intake orchestration can unlock strategic business value. With a full house of approximately 200 attendees from all over Europe and a strong speaker lineup, the sold-out one-day event underscored the growing urgency and opportunity to rethink procurement’s role in shaping a company’s agility and innovation.

This first European event marked a key milestone for Zip’s growing footprint. Since opening its London office in 2024, the company has expanded rapidly across the region — growing its employee base by 400% and doubling its EMEA customer base within a single year. This growth reflects accelerating demand for modern intake solutions that can meet the complexity of regional compliance needs and diverse operational environments.

From cost control to value enablement

The event opened with a clear message: Procurement is no longer simply a cost gatekeeper. As organizations face increased complexity in supplier ecosystems, regulatory pressure, geopolitical uncertainty and economic volatility, intake has emerged as a critical control point. Zip positioned itself as a platform not just for intake automation but for governance at scale, enabling finance and procurement teams to guide requests through compliant, efficient workflows from the first touch.

The opening keynote set the tone for the day, featuring voices from Zip’s leadership team and customers. Roque Versace, Managing Director EMEA, emphasized the strategic imperative of procurement’s evolution, noting, “Business resilience begins with procurement resilience.”

Co-founders Rujul Zaparde (CEO) and Lu Cheng (CTO) then provided a company update, highlighting Zip’s momentum in Europe and signaling the next wave of product innovation, particularly around risk orchestration.

The focus then shifted to how procurement teams can move beyond siloed and reactive risk management toward building embedded resilience. With growing regulatory scrutiny and financial uncertainty, speakers outlined how intake orchestration can transform procurement from a reactive function to a proactive one by enforcing compliance, mitigating risk and increasing adaptability across the organization.

Product direction and innovation

As part of this, Forward Europe also served as a launchpad for new product innovations. Nick Heinzmann, Zip’s Head of Research, alongside members of Zip’s product and engineering teams, introduced a set of new and upcoming enhancements designed to improve both upstream and downstream procurement resilience. 

On the upstream side, new features include pre-built questionnaires, intake forms and workflows to standardize data collection and streamline onboarding. Integrations with data validation tools and third-party risk/ESG platforms like EcoVadis enable early visibility into supplier risk, while automated risk scoring and a centralized risk register help ensure risk-aware decision making. Smarter and contextual workflows allow internal teams and external suppliers to collaborate more effectively from the start.

Downstream, Zip showcased capabilities such as AI-driven invoice encoding (OCR and metadata extraction leveraging AI and GenAI from OpenAI and Google), invoice hold automation and management, expanded support for e-invoicing compliance and payment fraud insights (using AI to identity, for example, risky behaviors).

Practitioner panels: Real-world traction

Throughout the day, practitioner-led sessions showcased how leading organizations are turning intake into a lever for speed, visibility and trust. Speakers from multiple European companies shared how they’ve approached intake transformation, not just from a technology perspective, but through change management, stakeholder alignment and process design.

Breakout discussions and advisory sessions allowed attendees to dig deeper into topics like AI in intake, integrating Zip with other systems and managing global approval processes. 

Final keynote: Bringing order to the chaos in the AI era

The day concluded with a keynote from Dr. Elouise Epstein, Partner at Kearney, who brought a dose of realism to the current discourse around AI in procurement. Titled ‘Bringing Order to the Chaos: Orchestration in the AI Era,’ the session challenged the audience to look beyond the hype surrounding Agentic AI and to confront the real barriers holding back enterprise transformation.

Epstein framed today’s moment as the beginning of procurement’s fourth technology era, the AI platform era, where intelligent agents will not only reshape traditional SaaS models but also expand deeper into S2P. Yet, as she emphasized, this evolution will not eliminate the need for orchestration; in fact, it will make orchestration more critical than ever. As specialized agents rise, the complexity of aligning those agents with governance, compliance and strategic goals will require a new kind of control layer, one rooted in orchestration.

The keynote underscored a sobering statistic: More than 80% of digital transformations still fail. Epstein argued that success in this new era will not come from technology alone, but from a combination of hard work, creativity and motivation/commitment. Organizations need to invest in both AI tools and new skills — ones that differ significantly from traditional procurement competencies. These include data literacy, critical thinking and design thinking.

In closing, Epstein reminded the audience that while the future of AI holds tremendous potential, it’s those who experiment and can bring order to the chaos — through disciplined orchestration and inspired leadership — who will define procurement’s next chapter.

Final thoughts

Forward Europe confirmed that Zip is evolving beyond its origins as a front-door intake solution. What began as a way to answer “What do you want?” — a transactional, ad-hoc request-centric view — is now increasingly enabling organizations to ask and answer a more strategic question: “What do we need?” This shift reflects both the maturity of Zip’s product and the growing recognition that intake orchestration can be more than ‘guided buying 2.0′ and become foundational to business value and agility. 

We discussed this topic in our analysis of last year’s Zip event in terms of the need for broader cross-functional orchestration (including third-party risk management) beyond intake management:

TPRM is a huge opportunity right now, as document-centric approaches die when they reach the scale needed to perform supplier management (i.e., management of risk, compliance, performance, onboarding speed and supplier collaboration that respects/accommodates supplier requirements) with fine-grained operating models. See our risk management guide and ongoing TPRM coverage.

And the need to move upstream to demand origination versus late stage requesting:

Intake may help automate and open the proverbial front doors, but procurement must then both create a great experience inside the door and engage stakeholders to help guide and orchestrate their buying processes, rather than sitting and waiting for late-stage requests when value creation levers are less available. 

The company’s product trajectory underscores this evolution. Recent enhancements expand Zip’s historical ‘intake’ capabilities from simply capturing requests to proactively managing the broader risk and operational agenda that organizations have.

On the tactical side of things, new intake-centric features, such as automated risk scoring and onboarding validations, make processes more context-aware — helping organizations spot and reduce risk early. This allows then organizations to leverage the data they have and collect from these intake processes to move to a more strategic management. For example, the introduction of a centralized risk register and richer supplier 360 capabilities signal a move toward enhanced embedded ‘resilience management’ capabilities.

And operationally, Zip is stepping into adjacent transactional territory, with features for invoicing, fraud detection and e-invoicing compliance that continues to blur the lines between intake orchestration and broader S2P functionality. And that brings yet another set of data points for broader supplier and risk management.

Interestingly, customer traction reflects this dual-path approach. Many larger enterprises are layering Zip into their existing technology ecosystems to orchestrate workflows across fragmented tools. Meanwhile, smaller organizations without a formal procurement stack are increasingly adopting Zip as an end-to-end purchasing and compliance hub, effectively using it as a lightweight P2P or S2P platform.

By balancing strategic vision with practical execution, Zip used Forward Europe not only to showcase product innovation but to reframe intake orchestration as a foundational layer of enterprise procurement strategy.