 From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 19, EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin, coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters. Joining me now is James Wagstaff, the Chief Procurement Officer of Providence. James, welcome to theCUBE. Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. So you've had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Providence, what you're doing with Coupa, but give our audience an overview of Providence, what you guys do and deliver to your customers. Very good. So Providence is a FTSE 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. So its real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Providence is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. Individuals as well as small businesses? Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Providence, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. Okay, so how long have you been there? I have been a Providence now since April of 2018. So we're coming up now to, I think, 19 months and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit car business, in April or April May. Okay, talk to me though about your journey in business and finance. You, one of the things I wrote about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations, to finance, to marketing, to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. So I'm a big fan of mental programs. I think everyone should have a mentor and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like and it was a holistic view. So procurement is worst, can be very tactical, very cost focused and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture about top line growth, not just bottom line. And right from day one, he seeded that in me and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Weston, if he's watching, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPO for Vimplecom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who had businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS and Asia PAC and then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company and I was traveling around the world on the sales side, facing procurement. So that was a very sobering and lightning experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table. And I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way that I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature, combined with I think a very business centric view of what procurement should do. Interesting that you said I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice and look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization. So it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. I did not. And I think that for me, it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow. And I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Cooper as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Cooper, not from a perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption. And if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system and then the data's in the system, you can do something with it. So you're not fighting that adoption issue. You would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt. And Cooper's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. Interesting that you talk about it is it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers, we're so used to that, right? I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within, sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we had this expectation and this demand. To your point though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up that consumer effects. Talk to me about that as an influence. Did you know kind of right away, experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive? Did you knew right away when you came in to Providence that I need to have something that is more consumer-like? I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given. So then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on system integrations and complexity. So you're then into the mid-market space and there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think that's probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room for three hours for an online demo, walk through the system. So it was a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Koopa? How they deliver that type of experience? It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Koopa. I think from the sales guys, I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff but it's not what they do, it's how they do it. And you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. Exactly. Well, one of the things that Rob Bernstein talks about and he spoke about it this morning is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's, we all know, whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether it's marketing, finance, operations, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centricity. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. You've got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be. And I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date, we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license as you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care. And then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit and you're on your own. And to date, Cooper done a great job. We've got Damian Penel, who's our success manager. He's, I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system's going to do what it promised to do and how do we get more value out of it. Some of it is about selling more licenses because Cooper have got other modules that they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay. If the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? So I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest, Cooper told me that said your spend through catalogue is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, nah, I don't believe you. And then they said your electronic invoicing could be 77% in your currently single digits. And I went, nah, I don't believe you. And then through the community, we spoke to co-op who were another Cooper customer and Mali there was saying, no, we're doing it. We're at this, we're at 95% or 97% even. And I went, well, how you doing there? And she just taught me through how they sell it to suppliers and how in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value out. So she didn't force them to do it. She just said, this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way. And she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's removed my own blockers in my own mind, in my own head, you can't do this. Well, insights and speaking to other communities says yes, I can. So it's changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business and finance. When you were given this great advice, like be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, but you believed you've been able to go from there to there? Yeah, so Terry would always say to me, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just whiteboard at a technical level what the solution is. I think that years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal. When you come to run the project to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off in a way that you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. So some of the news that came out today, they talked about what they're doing is to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclay Card's been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space, for instance, on the BGC side, we have this expectation as consumers, we can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as, on the B to B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Providence? We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm not in a position to talk authoritatively about it. In terms of taking the consumer kind of demand. I look at the one-time use credit cards and I'm really quite excited about what that could do and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well using the big data and AI stuff. So there's a few things in the roadmap that I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December, January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy roadmap, that's for sure. For last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's your best advice? Go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement and I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people and more lawyers and more different people from different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than I've grown up in procurement in the last 20 years sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic global view would be my suggestion. Well, James, that's great advice. I think for anybody anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. I'm sure he would. Thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. Dr. James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.