10x ROI in 10 months with Vertice

The Challenge

FMG is New Zealand’s leading rural insurer, providing advice and insurance to over 120,000 members and clients living in rural and provincial New Zealand.

As FMG’s tech stack grew to 70+ tools and its SaaS bills spiraled, it began to evaluate its process for managing software purchases and renewals. At the time, FMG worked with a third party that would renew contracts but put little to no focus on working with FMG to evaluate the need for the tool or its usage. They would renew the contract blindly without benchmarking contract prices, or negotiating with vendors to secure optimal pricing and contract terms. 

“Our contracts would typically renew without any discussion of the product’s value, suitability or how well we were utilizing it. We knew this was causing us to overspend on tools that were no longer the right fit for us,” said Christian Hayes, Head of Technology at FMG. 

After years of expensive auto-renewals, FMG’s leadership team knew that controlling SaaS spend was key to driving greater operational efficiency across the business. It began the search for a partner that could manage these contracts more proactively, and offer advice on software licensing and pricing trends. 

The Solution 

From the first conversation, FMG was impressed by Vertice’s industry knowledge, from the depth and breadth of its price benchmarking data on 16,000+ vendors, to its qualitative insights on the most suitable negotiation leverage for each vendor.

FMG’s dedicated Vertice Purchasing Manager immediately got to work using this intelligence to reassess FMG’s contracts, reducing costs and ensuring that contract terms were built in line with FMG’s actual needs, usage or likely future growth.  

The Vertice dashboard also gave the FMG team an easy-to-use overview of all the active SaaS tools in their organization - including usage insights, renewal dates and duplication risk - which provided the data FMG and Vertice needed to be more strategic about every software decision. 

The Results  

Vertice quickly delivered value for FMG, achieving a 10x return on investment in just ten months. 

As well as significant cost-savings, FMG has been struck by Vertice’s ability to mitigate the impact of soaring SaaS inflation. SaaS prices have been increasing at a far faster rate than overall market inflation, and so buyers have been struggling to secure maximum value from software vendors. In contrast, Vertice’s benchmarking, vendor knowledge and negotiation expertise has ensured that FMG has been consistently able to either reduce spend or get more for their money.