#208 - Pauline Glikman (Payflows) - FinTech Tackling the North Face of ERPs
CEO and Co-Founder of Payflows
In my episodes on the “CFO Stack”, we often explore the Finance Departments of SMEs. Today, with Pauline, we focus on the specific needs of CFOs in mid-sized companies. A critical point addressed by Payflows is the recentralisation of the Finance Department stack.
This management faces concrete challenges : the difficulty in producing, analysing, and sharing financial data, the diversity of data sources, the proliferation of systems, and their lack of connectivity.
The solution proposed by the start-up is designed in the form of modules adapted to purchasing, cash collection, and treasury, thus allowing CFOs to regain visibility on subjects that seem basic.
ERPs
Finance Departments have all equipped themselves with a unique tool, the “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP), with a fundamental accounting module at its core and a set of additional modules such as purchasing management, expense report management, collection management and treasury management. These integrated software systems help companies manage their operations. In the world of large enterprises, the main ERPs are Netsuite, SAP, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Xero, and Workday.
Due to the rigidity of classic ERPs and their lack of attention to user experience, vertical publishers have emerged to replace the various modules.
👉 For example, Coupa and Tipalti have targeted the “Purchasing” segment, Kyriba the “Treasury Management” segment, and Billtrust the “Collection Management” segment.
Finance Departments are complaining about the major drawbacks of the fragmentation of their stack :
Data is siloed between different systems, preventing the essential 360° visibility needed to steer a business.
Connectivity is lacking : significant integrator fees are required for the implementation and maintenance of these multiple systems. Furthermore, the components may be connected to the accounting system, but never to each other.
Reconciliation between systems is manual.
The fragmentation of systems and the absence of orchestration force employees to communicate by e-mail, creating an obvious barrier to productivity.
👉 As a result, Finance Departments lack visibility and face very high costs to produce, analyse, and share financial data.
Netsuite
If we focus on NetSuite, which Payflows integrates with, the American start-up was founded by Evan Goldberg under the name NetLedger in 1998 in the US, later becoming NetSuite in 2002. Under the leadership of its CEO, Zach Nelson (until 2017), the company experienced substantial growth, leading Oracle to acquire it in 2016 for USD 9.3 billion.
Payflows
Founded in 2022 by two former Luko employees, Pauline (ex-VP Operations) and her co-founder Joseph Assouline (ex-Head of ML), Payflows is an integrated software solution that offers a modular platform which reassembles all the modules traditionally offered by ERPs, except for the connectivity module with which Payflows connects via API.
The solution is designed in the form of adaptable modules: purchasing module, collection management, and treasury management, which can be subscribed to independently or not, thereby giving CFOs visibility and end-to-end reconciliation.
Among its clients, Payflows notably includes Swile, Spendesk, Evaneos, Reezocar from the Société Générale group, and Adevinta, the parent company of Le Boncoin. The start-up is increasingly interested in medium-sized and large “traditional” companies.
Among the investors, you find the Palo Alto-based fund Ribbit Capital (an investor in Coinbase, btw), Headline , and Motier, in a first seed round of EUR 5.5 million.
In terms of connectivity, Payflows already offers wide compatibility with various ERP systems (Netsuite, SAP, Dynamics), to the banking world (EBICS, SFTP, APIs) and to PSPs (Adyen, Stripe, Gocardless) as well as various tools in the corporate world (business messaging, contract databases, HR systems, etc.).
If you're confused about the differences between these payment schemes, some clarity can be found 👉 here. Otherwise, you can listen to the episode that I recorded with Edouard Mandon, the CEO of Numeral 👉 here.
otherwise…
Pauline’s recommendations for this week:
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong
😁 and….
2023 Clash of the ERP Titans – SAP vs Oracle vs Microsoft vs Infor 👉 Read
We specifically developed the topic of 'Business Intelligence' tools deployed in Finance teams with Rachel Delacour in the episode dedicated to Sweep (in 🇫🇷)👉 Listen.
For the news:
Just in case you missed it: “The State of the French ecosystem” (by A.Dewez) 👉 Download
🎧 Listen here
Payflows (🇫🇷)
Spotify / Google podcast / Deezer
👋 Contacts
Pauline Glikman / Payflows
Sources: Payflows, Crunchbase, Netsuite.