 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 19, EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin, coming to you from London. I'm at Coupa Inspire 19. Pleased to be joined by one of Coupa's spend setters. With me here is Al Williams, the Managing Director and Chief Procurement Officer at Barclays. Al, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa, thanks for having me. So, Barclays is a 300 plus year old bank. 335 years, I think. 335. Somewhere in that ballpark. I also was headquartered in London. I didn't know this until I did some research. Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM and the credit card. In the UK credit card. Wow. Right, the first credit card in the UK and the pioneer and inventor of the ATM, correct, yeah. So, when we think of an organization that is 335 years old, we think how agile is that organization? How transformative can it be? Talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff. What's that appetite and culture like? That's a great question, right? Because you think about a 335 year old bank, how innovative can it be, right? How agile can it be? And the market and the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector, especially on the retail and consumer side. Expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in the sector. And so for Barclays, it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank. How influential is the consumer side? Because as consumers, we are so used to being able to get anything that we want. We can buy products and services. We can pay bills with a click or a swipe. On the business side, it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate. It's a lot of other risks and security issues. How influential is to Barclays? Is your retail, your consumer business in terms of your B2B work? And that's a great question, because I think the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to B2B. And traditionally, business to business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated, streamlined, or frictionless as you would in a consumer model. So the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business to business models have been playing catch up for the last several years as a result. Talk to me about now the role of finance leaders. I was reading a survey that Cooper did recently of 253 UK-based financial decision makers. And a big number of them, I think it was 96%, said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spend. So there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper. But talk to me about how the role of the Chief Procurement Officer is changing. You've been doing it for quite a while, you're a veteran. What are some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in? Right. So I've been the Chief Procurement Officer of Barclays for two and a half years and the CPO of a large global technology company for nine years before that. So I think the role of the Chief Procurement Officer has changed significantly over the course of the last, say, 10 years, five years, two years. We're at a point now where the Chief Procurement Officer is seen as a source of, and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation. It's seen as a source of capacity creation for the organization for the company. And it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spend for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain. So the expectations for procurement have tripled, quadrupled, or more fold in the last four or five years. Some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Coupa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply, and I shouldn't say simply, but beyond dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spend. But it's being transformative to completely other areas. Like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability. You think, wow. So talk to me a little bit about, I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition. How are you leveraging that, and maybe your old American football days, to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays? Yeah, so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business, I think the concept of teams is key. And effective teams are built on trust. They're built on empowerment. They're built on collaboration, open communication, limited asymmetry and information that's passed from, and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on the football field, American football or other football or in the business environment or business context. So it's really, as a CPO and for all of the leaders on my team, it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player, when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem. But more importantly, when you need to be coach and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more successful. So you've been at Barclays a couple of years now. Talk to me about your use case that Barclays has with Koopa. What are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve? Yeah, so the relationship with Koopa's been great. Again, I joined the bank a couple of years ago. One of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations, to building out a new organization structure and operating model for procurement. I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology. And we didn't have a common procure to pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing its supply chain. So early on when I joined Barclays, partnering with Koopa working, both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region. And we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform. We're deploying to six more by the end of this calendar year. And over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational bank. So it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for Barclays. And part of that transformation journey, the technology piece is important but a lot of it's cultural. We talked about a history of a 335 year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform. That's challenging to get folks on board being comfortable with change. Is your spirit of competitiveness, was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get the 95%? Well, I think so. I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small, you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives, the adage we all have to be pulling on the rope together to achieve the end result. And I think in the case of sort of our Koopa journey, both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment, it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able to galvanize around and feel like they were a part of. And it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well. And kind of put us front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had never been before. So in terms of procurement, having a seat at the board table, is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business? Yeah, and look at Barclays, compared to some of my other experiences, it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table. We might have a seat at too many tables at times. There's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives. So with that seat comes a lot of responsibility. So I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that component of, it's not just about having a seat at the table, it's about what we're going to contribute. What are we going to do differently when we're at that table, when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization? And what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that we'll pick up as a result and deliver on those promises? That's absolutely critical. One of the things that was talked about this morning is trust. Rob Bernstein talked about it. They also had a guest speaker, Rachel Botsman, who's a trust expert. It was such an interesting conversation. You know, we talk about at any tech event that theCUBE goes to, you always talk about trust. Got to have trust in the data, you got to have trust in your suppliers. But what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust, but Cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers. Tell me about how Cooper has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have more trust of relationships with your executive and your peer teams. Yeah, I mean, it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front of us because we're in the business of trust. I mean, a bank is in the business of trust. That's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients. And I think, you know, within procurement, we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers. In the case of Cooper, frankly, it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me and with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability, right? Don't over promise and under deliver, but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability. But if something, and they always do, if something goes sort of not according to plan, right? It's be open, communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it. That, to me, is how we build trust in any team. And that's how we build trust with Cooper through our transformation over the last two years. That's critical, because to your point, no deployment probably ever goes critically according to plan. There are always things that happen, whatever the software or hardware is that we're talking about. And I think for companies to address that, confront it, help the customer through those challenges. To me, that's more valuable. I'm saying everything went beautifully, it was flawless. That's not reality. Right, I completely agree. And I think that's what separates good from great companies too, right? Is their ability to build that trust, whether it be within their supply chain, with their clients, with their employees. And look, it's a journey. It's not something you're one and done and you can say, okay, we've got the trust. You can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on those trusting relationships. That's a great point though that folks should think about that. We've earned this trust, but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it, so we grow it. Having the focus on that, because you're right. Whether it's a deployment of software, it's not one and done. It's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship. It's maintaining that. It's ensuring that there's value being delivered on both sides. That's right. Tell me a little bit about your ability, Barclay's ability as a spend setter in this program that Coupa has to influence technology directions. I think they talk a lot about the community, all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community. Is Barclay's able to be a strategic partner with Coupa rather than just a customer? Yeah, I feel we are. I mean, Rob and his team, Raja Ravi, the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclay. I'll be the first to admit, Barclay's and banking and banking specifically in the UK, it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that Coupa would work in. So what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us. And kind of flipping that around, there's certain things that we need from Coupa that we've been able to partner with and deliver over the course of the last two years. And the relationship with Coupa's been fantastic. They hear us, they listen to us, they help us understand what the solution can do, what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term. And then how do we augment that in the right way so that we don't create cottage industries of activity within procurement when we can be leveraging the capability of Coupa to deliver on those services. Right, so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly. Last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Coupa Pay with American Express, for example, and just some of the other innovations that Coupa is making. What are some of your thoughts? What are some of the things that excite you about the direction they're going in? Well, yes, so on the Coupa Pay front, I'm actually gonna be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Coupa Pay. Excellent. Because Markly Card is also a key component of that capability. Is that the first virtual card that they integrated? Probably, I believe it was, yeah. And so I think about payments is sort of the one, not the only, but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective. And it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having to, through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through. There's a lot of cost in that and a lot of time and very little speed. We wanna move the dial on speed, the value. We wanna move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our payment process. And that's where Coupa Pay and the Markly Card partnership with Coupa Pay has really played a key role in making that happen. So in Q1, we made our commitment to deploy Coupa Pay in Q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the basic Coupa platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year. On the payment side, one last thing that just popped up, I was doing some research and the B2C side is transformed much faster. A lot of demand from the consumers. We talked about that a minute ago. Do you see what the direction Coupa Pay is going in with Markly Card, for example, as bringing in some of the consumer influence to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there? I think yes, I think that's exactly right because again, when you think about the consumer side of payments, we're all using our phones, we're using other digital means, we're using wearables, we're using different ways of buying and paying, especially in retail. And the first question we have to ask ourselves is why can't those innovations be applied in a B2B space? Now, Coupa Pay is I think a start of sort of that journey. It's certainly not the end destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction. Yeah, we as consumers are quite demanding. Yes. I'll thank you for joining me on theCUBE and sharing the Markly's spend setter success story. Good luck tomorrow in your keynote. Thank you for having me. Thank you. My pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London 19. Thanks for watching.