6x ROI in 3 months with Vertice

The Challenge

Founded in 2016, GROW Inc is a fintech company transforming the Superannuation and Managed Funds industry in Australia. 

Its recent rapid growth naturally triggered an increasing reliance on numerous SaaS applications. But this brought challenges of controlling software spend, and visibility of all the SaaS applications used by the business - which in turn led to instances of duplication and wasted spend. ‍

Ting Lim, General Counsel & Company Secretary at GROW Inc, saw a need to evolve the way the company procured software:

“Prior to Vertice, there was no process or criteria for assessing vendors, benchmarking prices, or checking if there were already similar tools in place - not to mention very little experience in negotiating SaaS contracts in the business.”

Plus, the existing ad hoc approach was creating not only inefficiency, but also risk. 

As a financial services platform and administration provider, GROW Inc is bound by Australian financial regulations, including data security requirements, and particularly a data residency requirement to retain all customer data within national borders. 

But with fragmented SaaS purchasing throughout the business, and no consistency in the review of vendors’ security and data management during the process, there was a real risk of unsuitable software being brought in and increasing the security risk. 

Fortunately, GROW Inc found Vertice. 

Solution 

GROW Inc decided that given their stage of growth, it didn’t make sense to form a large and fully fledged in-house procurement team. Instead, they wanted to bake procurement logic into business functions, and automate as much as possible - not only for efficiency, but also for control and oversight.

Vertice immediately stood out as a platform that would help GROW Inc control the purchases being made, secure best prices, and also ensure the suitability, necessity, and even compliance of every SaaS application.

Vertice also developed a clear procurement workflow which speeds up approvals, creates a clear audit trail and ensures third-party compliance from SaaS vendors at every step - from automated security questionnaires to managing security reviews.

“We are not yet of a size to require a full procurement team. But we do need procurement principles hardwired into how we operate. With Vertice, I can put an automated procurement function into every department. I now have confidence that any SaaS purchases or renewals have been checked for their necessity, have gone through the appropriate approval workflow, and that the tool is suitable and safe for us to use. All that, plus the benchmarking work and experienced negotiation team at Vertice who ensure we pay the best price for engagements that suit our needs.” 

Results 

Within days of starting, Vertice gave GROW Inc unprecedented visibility into the extent and cost of the SaaS stack. This has ranged from real-time SaaS usage, to renewal dates and terms, plus tool duplication and necessity. This visibility also allowed the GROW Inc team to immediately identify the existence of SaaS tools they didn’t even realize they had - and some they no longer needed.

“Vertice has helped us understand everything about our tech stack - including how much it costs, what each product does, how we are using it and even whether we need it. I was surprised by the sheer number of SaaS tools we had and particularly the amount of tool duplication.” 

The Vertice team took control of negotiating GROW Inc’s new software contracts and renewals. The combination of the experience of Vertice’s buyers, their knowledge and understanding of GROW Inc’s business and objectives, and Vertice’s up-to-date benchmarking data, meant Vertice delivered over 6x ROI in just the first three months of the partnership.

Importantly, as a scaling company GROW Inc needed to balance short term cost savings with planning for growth in the future. These negotiations were therefore approached highly strategically, futureproofing GROW Inc’s contracts against runaway costs caused by headcount growth.

And crucially, GROW Inc now has confidence in - and evidence of - how suitable its suppliers are in terms of their data management. 

“We now have a SaaS procurement tool that is centralised, automated and meets our needs to monitor security and third party risk. Compliance and legal requirements are built into the process and everything we do is fully auditable.”

With the Vertice partnership, GROW Inc is also prepared for any upcoming changes in compliance and risk requirements, including the imminent Australian CPS 230 regulation a part of which will require financial services organizations to have greater understanding of operational and third party risk:

“Audit trails and risk management make Vertice an instrumental part of our ongoing compliance. Instead of having to scramble to adapt to new regulations, we have already used automation to minimize our exposure to risk from third party vendors.”

Aside from the cost and time savings, working with Vertice fostered a sense of ownership and accountability across departments, ensuring everyone played a role in making smart procurement decisions. 

“We’ve evolved quickly and painlessly, from ad hoc ‘invisible’ purchases to now driving a genuinely cost-aware culture where our teams are very naturally thinking about how much money they are spending and what on.”

It’s hard to imagine a better example of procurement digital transformation at scale.

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