The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

96 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om I NT E R V I EW Growth through partnership Basware is looking to drive further revenue by taking a more open approach to collaboration with its partners BY A L E X SM I TH F innish financial software company Basware delivers its cloud-based purchase-to-pay and e-invoicing solution for organisations across the world. Its extensive open commerce network connects over two million active buy- ers and suppliers, delivering tools to reduce their costs, manage spending and forecast future growth. This ability to operate on a worldwide scale is seen as a major strength of the company’s offering says its CEO, Klaus Andersen. “The organisations that we serve are typically very large, with a global reach,” says Andersen. “Last year, we had more than 150 million doc- uments flowing through the network, coming from more than 170 different countries. One of our unique selling points is that we can cope with the complexity of running a global enter- prise business and doing business globally.” One significant challenge, however, can be serving organisations of a smaller size. While large multinational companies may typically send digital invoices that are easier to process, smaller organisations often still work with paper. “Our promise is to enable our customers to have 100 per cent visibility into their spend,” says Andersen. “We can support electronic invoices, but we are also able take in a PDF file and con- vert it so that it can be processed in the best way on the buyer side. We can even take in paper invoices, because of our agreements with scan- ning partners and manual validation processes. The full invoice flow can therefore be taken into the solution, meaning that you have the data foundation that can be classified and analysed in our platforms to deliver on the promise of 100 per cent spend visibility.” Basware has recently taken on a new approach that embraces the contribution of partners. “I would say that in the modern world, it’s not about having a system that caters for everything you do,” says Andersen. “We have deliberately decided that we want to be the best in the areas we are in, and not to play in the space where we will only be second best. So we realised that the best thing to do for our customers is to open up our platform so that it can peacefully coexist with best-of-breed solutions. We have opened up all of our internal APIs to make it very easy for compa- nies to integrate their solutions and grow with us.” The company‘s partner-first strategy will be a key driver for future growth. “We see ourselves as a growth company and the partner strategy is part of this growth,” says Andersen. “You cannot grow with pace unless you think wider than just normal deployment sites implementation. For that, you have to think about how partners fit into the picture as well.”