 From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube, covering Koopa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Koopa. Welcome to The Cube, Lisa Martin on the ground at Koopa Inspire 19 at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Koopa is a company that has a lot of energy. If you go to their website Koopa.com and check out some of their videos, the energy is awesome and I'm happy to have some of that energy with me next. We have Rajah Hamoud, SVP of products from Koopa. Rajah, welcome to The Cube. Thank you for having me. It's so good to be here. Thank you for coming. Oh, we're excited to be here and I enjoyed your keynote this morning. Chandra, I had him on a little bit ago and I thought this company has naturally this culture of energy, very inspirational, no pun intended with the theme, Inspire. But one of the things that really struck me about your keynote this morning is that the way that you, as the SVP of products, the way that you announced some of the great things that you guys are doing with AWS, with Koopa Pay, with more partners, was explained so clearly and articulated so beautifully that people get it. So give us a little bit of an overview of business spend management, the platform that you guys have been building, this category and how Koopa works to help companies really transform for KRIMA. Thank you. Thank you for coming in and being part of this wonderful community. Let me start with business spend management. We're incredibly excited to be co-creating this whole category with the entire customers and analysts and partners. And essentially we have moved to a stage in time where we're looking at spend across the entire company, not some kind of spend, not expenses, not procurement. Just like companies look at CRM for managing everything around their sales-facing activities, business spend management is about doing exactly the same thing on the spend management side. And there's a lot of similar things between them because on the CRM and the customer facing areas, there's a ton of focus on consumerization and how do you attract customers. Well, those concepts also are the key to success in business spend management because ultimately the goal is all about how do I get to a point where everybody is doing what they're supposed to do, to lower cost, do things, reduce risk, etc., etc. But when you look at large companies and you're talking about 10,000 people, 20,000 people, it comes down to every single person wanting to be a part of it, which means you've got to reach them, you've got to consumerize the experience so that it becomes a place that you can connect with. So that's a big focus for us. The consumerization is so important. We talk about it at a lot of events, but as consumers of, I've been saying a number of times say whether it's a vehicle that you're in the market for, a home mortgage, whatever it happens to be, something for your dog on Amazon, maybe that's just me. You can get access to it very quickly. You can see all the different suppliers, different prices, and you're so informed as a consumer. Absolutely. But then that consumer on a Sunday, on a Monday, might be in procurement or even in a line of business that has to be managing a contingent workforce. So there's that expectation, deliver me the same experience when I'm a consumer at home, when I'm in my day-to-day job. And that's something that you really can get a sense for how Coupa is enabling that potential there, to not just transform procurement, but what transforming procurement can do for top line of a business. Absolutely, absolutely. And something very interesting here as well, which is when you think about B2B experiences, it's almost where B2B professionals have gotten to a point where their expectations from their consumer lives, they just die because they're not getting that type of experience. And it is time, it is time to bring everyone into it and give them the same level of experience. Now, what we're doing something very, very unique and incredibly special in this industry, which I believe is going to light up this industry on fire, is the idea of a community intelligence. It's the ideas of you talk a lot about big data and the importance of AI and big data. What we've done here is after over a decade in this industry, helping each and every company in a SaaS platform get their spend under management, now with trillions and trillions of dollars that are going through that platform. What is happening now is we have incredible intelligence that we're able to offer to each and every business and each and every user. Something very approachable and very simple from one of the goals of business spend management is that everybody to be able to do their processes very fast. So we gamified it. We simply allow every user to see how well they're doing compared to the rest of the community at large. I saw that the tortoise in the hair. The tortoise in the hair. This thing is incredible. It's a simple idea. However, what it is doing is it's moving people in the right direction in terms of doing things faster, not sitting on these expense reports, etc. Because as you heard today, when you look at the stories, when you're late on invoices, etc. Yes, it's a back office function, but you're not delivering the actual service, whether it is for the American Red Cross. Right, the casket effect can be. Right. The magnitude of that can be huge. Exactly, exactly. So community intelligence continues to be a very incredible, exciting opportunity for us overall. And you will hear a lot of the conversations happening with customers trying to think of what else they want to compare to others. A lot of the buzz was created around spend guard. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that today. Because as we think about it from a fraud detection and a security perspective, those are essential elements to embed in any technology, in any industry. What are you guys doing there that you really kind of dialed it up? It is incredibly exciting. So of course, whenever there's money, there's going to be fraud. But that happens everywhere in the world. When we looked at that problem, we looked at it holistically, which is in the market, you might find technology that thinks about, let's do expenses fraud and somebody who's going and detecting if people are doing that. But when we deflect it on it, fraud is a human behavior. It's a person who's doing this. And if that person is doing it, they're going to do it in expenses and in contracts and in sourcing everywhere they get their hand on in payment. So we said, what we need to do is to look at it holistically. Let's look at the user patterns and what are the suspicious activities that we're seeing. So platform-wide user patterns by looking at everything where that's the entire span. And then what we did is, OK, great, how do we do it? We use AI to do it. And this is where we do deep learning so that we can look at clusters and see, oh, this is what is normal for this group. These are the outliers. So we start surfacing these kinds of things up for the auditors themselves. But then we said, it's not enough to just detect the fraud because by the time you detect it, the money's went up. Yeah. Yes. So you have to recover it. And now you have to go into recovery. Who wants to do that? So that's where we added the principle of in-flight. In-flight, catch it. Route it right when it is. And this is just the beginning. So reactive to proactive? It is, yes. Instead of after the fact, I'm going to tell you and stop it right now so you don't pay it. Don't even pay it. Instead of the past used to be about recovery approaches because you detected the fraud two months later and you go back to whoever did the fraud and you're trying to recover your money. Got it. This is don't pay the money. Find it in that moment in time. And that's the beginning. And now we're looking at not only within companies but also across in the B2B with suppliers. Right. Right, because there's a lot of schemes where a supplier might have a relationship with multiple people at different companies and they have all sorts of schemes might be going on. So as we start doing that, back to community intelligence, we'll be looking at how to surface that to the entire community at large. So the benefit of everybody. That was something that really struck me, Raja, yesterday when Rob kicked everything off. And I just thought, you know, it's not just a community that has access to all the transactions, 1.2 trillion dollars, billion dollars of transactions going through the Coupa platform, which is 5x increase in just the last few years alone, which is huge. But it's this collaborative community where customers from company A and company B that are using Coupa are going to be able to benefit from each other. It's this vision, though, that you guys have had for a long time at Coupa to build it around this community, this tribe. And as we look at how many patterns in everyday lives B2B, B2C are changing, being community driven, whether it's 80 plus percent, when I was talking to Chandra a little bit ago, 80 plus percent of buying decisions are done, are driven by the buyer, because there's so much access to information. Don't you want to learn from others who have experienced good or bad with a particular supplier or particular vendor and share that information? And so really the collaborative spirit of Coupa's community is really, it seems quite unique to me. It has been quite incredible. And when it started, it started in face to face. It wasn't in the technology itself. When we started, it was in community advisory board meetings where we're sitting up and thinking about areas we want to go to. You came in to inspire today. I'd say, for example, a couple of inspires ago, I came in, I talked about a new concept that we're getting into. I left the stage and several customers came to me and they're like, we want to help shape this. And I said, absolutely, and guess what they did? They took it upon themselves to organize the meetings and to lose, I'm not kidding, and they brought customers themselves and we went in there and we co-developed and co-created the product by working with everyone. And that was always the spirit. And then what we did after that is layer the technology on top, which is to start looking at the entire big data and start to anonymize all of that data, aggregate it and start surfacing these insights about risk, about fraud, about opportunities for companies. One of the exciting things, for example, now we have in the community, is if you want to go look to buy anything, you can go and search for it. What will come back to you is a bunch of suppliers with a lot of data about them. But what's special here, this is not, we can go look at a directory and give you data about a directory of what these suppliers said about themselves. We went after the entire transactions across the whole ecosystem that has been anonymized and we're telling you based on that data, these suppliers are supplying this item. You're getting real world information about who is supplying them, with scores on how good they are. It's really, really exciting shift that we're taking as we go into the world of community intelligence and applying it at large. Yeah, well it's another thing that you guys do really well that I've observed in the last couple of days is we were talking about customer advisory boards before and I know a number of customers that were on the program with me the last couple of days talked about that. These customers are, the example that you just gave is very cool where they're driving, they're bringing you to more customers. But that sense of customers feeling, Coupa isn't only listening to us, we're co-curring with them, they're part of this community. That's also something that was refreshing to hear. Thank you, thank you. Because at the end of the day, that's why any business is in business is you're selling a product or service, you're not creating something that's hopefully going to meet some esoteric right problem or concern. It's that co-creation there that vibe is very, very evident. We've seen it and heard it from customers, those that were on stage, those that were here with us today and that's something that I just think really sets Coupa apart. Thank you, thank you. It's been a true joy. I mean, when I think of, I can't remember where I read this, but it really resonated with me, is real bonding happens when you co-create something together. And that is the essence of why we have this vibe that you are feeling with our customers. Because you take examples like Nike, when they started on their journey with us, Nike wanted to go into a payment factory and how to factor payments. When we first started, we were very upfront about our capabilities. We cannot support these things, but we started to discover, talk about it rolled up our sleeves and we started to dig in. In their use cases, we're different. Their use cases where they're looking at all of the invoices that are thousands of lines long because of all the different parameters on the shoes that they are getting for orders. When we looked at these, we didn't have these capabilities. We partnered with them. And as we did that, we did it in, not in isolation, we did it because we know there are other customers like this that have these knees, we just haven't hit them yet. So we started to talk to all these customers, validate ideas and we went on a journey that went on for a good two and a half years and now has made the product so strong and so many customers are using these kind of capabilities. But we've co-created all of that together which is incredibly special. Another thing as we're getting close to wrapping up here that you talked about in your keynote today that was also mentioned yesterday a number of times is speaking of co-creation. Over 300 new developments and advancements in the mod form since just last year's inspired 12 months. That's a tremendous amount of R&D but that's done in conjunction with this community. This co-creation there is really allowing you guys to move probably faster, I imagine. Absolutely, absolutely. The pace is just incredible. And of course that's part of the growth where we now have separate teams dedicated for each of these functional areas so we can drive more and more of those kinds of ideas. But yes, and we're only accelerating, we're growing so we should be seeing even more. Well that's good because the A in Coupa is for accelerators. Accelerate it. That's exactly what you should be doing. Roja, I wish we had more time. I think you and I are just scratching the surface so you're going to have to come back. I would love it. Such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you, my pleasure as well. Thanks for having us here, it's awesome. And I can't wait to see where the next year goes. Thank you. All right, for Roja Hamoud, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.