Expenses and invoicing platform wants to harness buying power of UK’s 5.7m SMEs
SAP Concur, the digital invoicing and expenses solutions provider, plans to become an SME champion going forward harnessing the buying power of its customers.
The company, which currently has over 2,000 users in Britain and 25,000 customers worldwide processing $94 billion in spend, argues that by coming together, its customers would have spending power to rival corporations.
At present, corporates enjoy discounted packages on employee healthcare, employee benefits and recruitment, as well as advantages when it comes to negotiating commercial leases and recruitment.
SAP Concur sees itself offering similar discounts to SMEs in future, harnessing their combined buying power.
More than 2 million SMEs have launched in Britain since 2000; 200,000 of those within the last two years.
Meanwhile in the USA, SMBs – companies with up to 1,000 employees – account for $8 billion of the region’s $10 trillion worth of GDP.
Christal Bemont, SVP & GM of the Small, Midsized and Nationals business unit, told SME: “We talk about levelling the playing field, taking some things that we’re doing at SAP Concur and bring them all together for SMBs, allowing them to act and perform like big businesses.
“What if we took it one step further and harnessed their collective power through SAP’s connective tissue? With buying power, we can start to reduce costs in your organisation such as employee benefits, connecting buyers with suppliers in a two-sided marketplace. We want to help SMBs be as powerful as they can be. Bringing them together, we have the power to leverage them into one of the most powerful buyers in the globe.
“We can give them the tools to make them more powerful, removing the limitations that only bigger companies have. If you’re a Fortune 500 company, you’ve got a lot of buying power. Over time, this playing field is going to be level and the limitations on SMBs are going to be removed, giving them more power. SAP Concur doesn’t care what size business you are.”
SAP Concur enjoyed its busiest day ever last month, processing 875,000 expenses reports, 357,000 travel bookings and 75,000 invoices on September 4.
“It shows how stable our system is to work under that scale,” said Dafydd Llewellyn, SAP Concur MD of SMB for UK & France.
