 From the cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin coming to you from Las Vegas, Coupa Inspire 19. I'm excited to be welcoming to theCUBE for the first time, Robbie Talker, the SVP of business acceleration from Coupa. Robbie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa, appreciate it. So day one, everybody had started the day off, the general session was lots of information from Rob, we heard from Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite storytellers. If I can master telling a story the way he does, that would be awesome. But we've also heard from some customers today, we had Lulu Lemon on, Staples, KPMG, Deloitte, people are excited about the innovations and how Coupa is really helping to transform the CPO, the CFO and help these guys and gals become much more strategic. Lots of change there and lots of forcing functions too, like consumerization and pricing pressures and all these things. But something that you guys announced back in, I believe November 2018, just about six months ago was Coupapay. Talk to us a little bit about Coupapay in the spirit of this event's theme of spend smarter together. What is Coupapay, what were some of the gaps in the market that you guys saw and thought we could help B2B customers uncriple themselves? Yeah, absolutely, thanks. Thanks for those questions, Lisa. You know, I've been with Coupa for over 12 years now and throughout that time, I've had thousands of conversations with spend management professionals across all different topics. But whenever payments would come up, there's always a sense of like, it's kind of a nightmare, it's a mess for us, let's not talk about that. And what we've seen is that, you know, a lot of large companies have multiple ERP systems and when you have multiple ERP systems, trying to get a hold of the data and being able to control the funds going out can be a little bit of a challenge. Then when you start mixing in that there's so many different ways to pay suppliers, you know, whether it's a credit card or a digital check or cross-border payment, whatever it may be, it becomes a big conglomeration of a big nightmare. And so when we started looking at payments, we wanted to figure out, well, how can we simplify this experience for our customers? Because we already have best in class procurement, best in class AP automation, adding payments was kind of an easy decision. Natural evolution? A natural evolution of how we were progressing or kind of move into business spend manager, categorization of business spend management. And so when we started the journey, we made the decision maybe about 18 months ago to actually start getting into this a little bit. And we started off, as you mentioned last November with announcing virtual cards on purchase orders. We've started adding other things like early pay discounts, which are kind of a financing type of solution. And just yesterday or actually just today, Rob announced general availability for invoice payments, which is really the workhorse of payments really. It's taking all of your invoices that you have as a company and how do you pay your different suppliers? I can imagine a company would have multiple banks that they're dealing with to pay different suppliers. Different suppliers probably had different preferences. And then what's the percentage of invoices that are being paid by paper check still? Yeah, I mean, in the US, I think at a statistic from 2016, it's a couple of years dated, but it's 51% of payments in the US is still via check. It's crazy. And I had a meeting earlier today with a pretty large customer and they're telling me about how their treasury, the woman that runs treasury for them, she walks around with the key fob of 12 different key fobs for two factor authentication to log into 12 different banks all over the world. And a lot of that is very painful. It's opens themselves up to a lot of inefficiencies to risk to potential fraud. And with the payment solutions that we're offering that we're actually now generally available with, we're able to solve a lot of those challenges. It's really exciting for us. Absolutely and driving up the efficiency of accounts payable by having all of these options, can imagine from a customer's perspective, all of the elements in that business that are going to get tighter, going to get more simple and where it's going to really be an enabler of an organization's overall digital business transformation. Yeah, it's one of the last areas of transformation we see in business spend management. We've already as mentioned the procurement process, AP automation, we already handle expense reporting. And now when you starting to look at payments and doing it at the scale that we're looking at doing, there are a lot of payment solutions out there, a lot of payment providers, but none of them have the backing of the procurement process. None of them have the rich invoice data that we bring to the table, let alone the ability for us to send payments, do payments domestically across the globe, which is a very unique differentiator for us, along with being able to pay out cross-border payments in hundreds of countries. Now, the other thing that we've seen from organizations, especially as the way that the economy and organizations have evolved, you're not just paying a supplier that has ACH information, right? They're not willing to provide you with their bank account information. It might be a five-person flower shop that you need to buy flowers from occasionally. It may be temp labor that you have hired for certain projects or contingent workforce for certain projects, or maybe even paying back your employees through expense reports. And so as we've architected our payment solutions, we've looked at all of these together and figured out what are the different optimal ways to do that. As a matter of fact, we're announcing a partnership with PayPal. So in order to now send payments via PayPal from a business PayPal account from our customer to the PayPal accounts of some of their smaller suppliers. So that's a unique way that we're thinking about what are the common use cases scenarios in the consumer world and bringing that into the business environment? Yeah, that consumerization effect is so interesting because we're all consumers every day, whether we're shopping for some beach wear for our backyard barbecue or something on Amazon or whatever happens to be, we have this expectation culturally we're trained, we can find anything, we can get anything, we can see all the suppliers and the different prices and select, read all these reviews. Because we're so conditioned to that in our everyday lives, those people that are doing that then have buying decisions and buying roles in their companies expect the same experience. Right, absolutely. And you guys are listening to your customers and enabling that, which is huge, hugely impactful to every industry. Manufacturing, retail, healthcare, you name it. Yeah, yeah, any business that has employees, which is every business in the world. You know, it's a great point, right? I mean, just the consumerization of all of these different aspects of business and that's where, you know, as we started, when we started Coupa and as we've continued to grow throughout our expansion, it's just really listening to our customers, listening to the vibrant community that we've created. You know, I met a lot of meetings today and I met with another customer a couple of hours ago and he was super excited about how he's been on our Coupa community. We have a portal for our customers. They can put in their ideas and talk about and have conversations. He just loves the way that we've been able to react and be able to implement a number of his solutions that have made his life easier along with the broader community of buyers that we have. Hey, all the marketing material talks about this BSM community that is developing together. And that was one of the themes I felt that I heard from Rob this morning during his general session is this, not only is this community incredibly rich with data, $1.2 trillion of money they're going through this, which is a 5x multiplier from, I think he showed us that it's a 2016, but it's also encouraging suppliers that are in there, customers that are in there, are able to learn and save from each other. The collaboration element was really, I thought, quite potent and it sounded like quite a differentiator to me. Right, absolutely. And when you think about it, I think Rob talked about what we're calling prescriptions, right? Yes, 18,000 so far. Right, exactly. And the ability to take a look at it, it's not just $1.2 trillion worth of spend, it's 5 million suppliers. It's not all of them have catalog items, but a lot of them do have catalog items. It's looking across millions of purchase orders, millions of invoices across the system and being able to rationalize and look at data and look at all of these different trends that no one's able to do. And really it's just the beginning of the power of what we're doing. We've introduced our business spend index, which is a leading indicator of how the economy and businesses are operating. We're really just starting to scratch the surface in this area. I mean, 1,000 customers is great, but as we continue to grow and expand and multiply our customer base, we're gonna be able to help things around broader supply chain initiatives, help things around sustainability, help organizations figure out, are they working with suppliers that are not only suppliers that are risky, which we do today, but what about tier two suppliers or tier three suppliers that have a potential risk in their supply chain? And as we start to accumulate a lot more data, we're able to do things that really no one's ever been able to do ever. So back, thinking back the 12 years that you have at Coupa and the massive transformation that you've seen in every industry, this, all of these different disruptors, like we talked about earlier, all of the changes that are really forcing CPUs and CFOs to become sort of those fraud detectors and those strategic thinkers because they can see there, this isn't just about buying and sourcing. There is tremendous business potential by having that visibility where all your spend is in one platform. That's absolutely transformational. Yeah, what do businesses do? They spend money or they sell goods or services and we have half of that equation and we're doing it at a scale that hasn't been seen before. So yeah, the ability for us to over what we've seen over the past 12 years, not just what's happening at a macroeconomic level, that's a big part of it, but just in general, what's the thinking of the CPOs? What's the thinking of the CFOs? How are they starting to look at things? How are they starting to feel the empathy for their employees? The empathy for their suppliers in making business decisions? And we're now part of that conversation. We're part of that equation as these companies are looking at these things. And have you seen the rules of the CPO and the CFO start to change, to start embracing emerging technologies, embracing AI and machine learning and understanding how that can really, once they have the data and they can apply intelligence and train the machines, how much potential they have or are they receptive now? It's just the start. It's just the start. I mean, when I joined Coupa 12 years ago, Salesforce is really just starting to get going with the whole SaaS thing. And it's been a phenomenal change. We had the opportunity to have lunch with Malcolm Gladwell today as an executive team. And one of the things that we talked about was Silicon Valley and what's happening in general with technology. And he put it very clearly. He said we're in the first minute of the technology revolution. It's still super early in how things are moving and transforming in this world. And we're at the forefront today. We want to continue to be there as the world changes. So lots of exciting news today. You mentioned PayPal. What are some of the other things that are going to be coming out this week that are exciting to you and your customers? Yeah, so a lot of things that are coming out for payments specifically, we're going to be announcing a number of partnerships in the morning. I'll be announcing a number of partnerships on the main stage. We're doing, as mentioned, something with PayPal. We're going to announce that Citibank has joined as a virtual card issuer on the CoupaPay platform. They're one of the largest global issuers in the world. We're introducing Transformat as a strategic partner for money movement. And kind of one of the more unique things is, when you think about payments and when you think about our community of buyers and suppliers, it's buyers and it's suppliers. And so we want to start spending more time and more focus, at least from a payment standpoint, on how can we make it easier for suppliers to do business with their customers. We're also going to announce an integration with Stripe. So Stripe is one of the bigger fintechs in the world, one of the darling fintech companies around. And what they're doing is, because of their capabilities around the card processing standpoint, not to get into too much of the details, but we can now enable a super or a higher level of efficiency for card acceptance, for suppliers that hasn't been seen before through our virtual card capabilities. So we're really excited about these partnerships and there's a lot more to come over the next several months here. It's well, to borrow this from Malcolm Gladwell, the fact that he thinks we're in the first minute of this technology revolution is like, oh, shocking. But what all I've heard all day today is customer centricity, supplier centricity. Robbie, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and giving us some of your time on this very exciting day. I know day two will be probably as action packed tomorrow, but we appreciate your time. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Appreciate it. For Robbie Talker, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Koopa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. Thank you.