Company post: Megatrends support Basware’s cloud growth
Digitalization continues to be one of the biggest megatrends impacting people and businesses world-wide. Everything that can be automated will be automated. Basware has been the front runner in Purchase-to-Pay market with its pioneering e-invoicing solution. The work is not over yet – there’s still plenty of opportunities to automate processes and solve inefficiencies.
Digitalization has been more advanced in the Nordics, where Basware estimates that approximately half of mid-to-large organizations are already using a cloud-based P2P solution. Whereas in the US, Germany, France and UK the automation process has only just begun – Gartner expects that only 50 percent of major global companies will have a cloud-based P2P solution in place by 2025. Basware estimates that its addressable market is worth approximately EUR 5 billion annually. However, when all major global companies adopt cloud-based purchase-to-pay solutions Basware expects the market opportunity to reach EUR 15 billion annually.
The technological development in Purchase-to-Pay has been rapid. In the 1990s Purchase-to-Pay solutions were mostly just an extension of an on-premise ERP system, whereas today the industry leaders provide cloud-based solutions based on artificial intelligence with significantly wider capabilities from e-purchasing to spend analytics and e-invoicing. The new frontier is using data to drive value: purchase-to-pay processes create huge amounts of data, which is fuel for artificial intelligence and machine learning. As just one example these technologies can be used to predict invoices that are at risk to being paid late or even fraudulent.
At first hand sustainability might seem like a megatrend that is far from the P2P business, but it is exactly the opposite. Companies want and need visibility to their supply chain to increase efficiency and ensure environmental and social compliance. Not to mention that the move from manual and paper-heavy invoicing processes to Basware’s solutions cuts carbon emissions by over a third.
As recently discovered in the Economist Intelligence Unit reportcommissioned by Basware, even global trade politics such as post-Brexit trade negotiations and US-China trade wars are likely to impact companies’ trade strategies. Procurement professionals are concerned that these global events will result in greater supply-chain complexity and a decrease in business opportunities. It is becoming more and more important to have a fully digital, consolidated financial and supply chain information to help analyze and mitigate risks and to seek greater efficiencies from the P2P process.