Vendor Snapshot 2020 Update, Part 3 (SWOT, Competitor Review)

Yooz is one of the many providers that compete in the accounts payable automation market, and Spend Matters plans to launch its first AP Automation SolutionMap this spring. Combining a granular, AP-centric capability assessment with real-life customer reviews gives a deeper understanding of specialty vendors like Yooz. Initially, the AP Automation ratings will be published as a stand-alone benchmark ranking. The Invoice-to-Pay (I2P) SolutionMap rankings will eventually be enriched with AP Automation functional requirements as well.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Snapshot series provides updates since our 2018 review of Yooz. The three-part series includes facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations make informed decisions about Yooz’s solution offering in payment automation and e-invoicing markets.

Part 1 of our analysis provided a company background and detailed solution overview, as well as a summary recommended fit suggestion for when organizations should consider Yooz for finance technology. Part 2 covered product strengths and weaknesses.

This final installment offers a vendor SWOT analysis and competitor comparisons with vendors like Coupa, Basware, SAP Ariba, Oracle, Tipalti and Medius. It also includes more evaluation and selection considerations.

SWOT Analysis

Competitive Analysis and Comparison

Yooz primarily focuses on the accounts payable automation sector, however this has become an increasingly dynamic market with competition from multiple angles.

Yooz’s primarily competition falls into the AP automation and invoicing area. This segment includes providers without broader P2P or S2P capability (and often without a network-based connectivity model). These providers include Xerox, Lexmark, ReadSoft, Captiva (EMC), ABBYY, Perceptive, Esker, Tipalti, Veem, etc.

Other competition is likely to come from e-invoicing specialists and supplier networks.

This segment includes providers such as:

Tradeshift, Basware, Tungsten and Proactis, as well as independent e-invoicing specialists like Taulia, Pagero and Transcepta that offer similar capability, albeit position themselves less as networks and more as application specialists in the area of supplier enablement and transactional connectivity.

Competition in the P2P market, which has seen vendor consolidation and more interest in AP automation, includes P2P solution providers like Coupa, SAP Ariba, Corcentric (Determine), Ivalua, GEP, Jaggaer, Zycus, Vroozi, OpusCapita and Medius (Wax Digital).

These providers offer e-procurement and e-invoicing capability — and also broader analytics, sourcing, contract management and supplier management capabilities.

A final class of competitors include specialist (often EDI-centric) providers that also offer EDI- and vertical-specific, direct materials-based connectivity: Oildex, OpenText (GXS) and SPS Commerce

Select competitive profiles include:

Coupa

Coupa has great traction among suite customers that want a streamlined deployment, a simplified user experience and the ability to capture all spend from a single interface.

It also has invested heavily in invoice-to-pay and delivers top tier performance in support of these requirements. With its newest payment solution, “Coupa Pay,” it has entered into the SME’s AP automation specialist market. It works as a one-stop-shop for a company’s B2B payments and financing, with its key capabilities like The Payment Hub (mass payments) and the Early Payment Discount solution (Accelerate).

Coupa, with its invoice-as-a-service model, also has invested heavily in its invoice capturing and validation capabilities. Its global invoice compliance capabilities makes it compliant out of the box with more than 40 countries with e-invoice regulations — standing out relative to peers and further increasing its attractiveness to organizations pursuing truly global P2P deployments on an end-to-end basis, including payment processing.

Basware

Basware manages one of the largest e-invoicing and B2B commerce networks. Its solutions span the entire P2P process — from requisition through payment, financing and post-transaction analysis — and includes the Basware Network, which has over 150 million annualized transactions with an annual spend of 650 billion euro. The network also includes 220+ interoperability partners and 1.5 million+ active buyers and suppliers, supporting more than 70 e-invoice formats and VAT compliance in more than 50 countries. It also is a certified PEPPOL Access Point.

Basware has 295 people working in R&D. Research and development investments were 21.3% of net sales during 2018. Also that year, Basware’s R&D focused on improving the performance, resilience and scalability — in addition to some machine learning features.

Basware is competitive today with Yooz in the AP automation and broader invoice-to-pay areas and offers top-tier capabilities in these areas. An overall market basis, Basware is one of the vendors with the strongest payment automation capabilities — and coverage/strength in the middle market as well.

SAP Ariba, now part of the SAP Intelligent Spend Group, continues to invest heavily in its user interface, its transactional procurement (guided buying and spot buy) and network capability, including recently expanding into direct spend support as a replacement for legacy EDI models. In the invoice-to-pay area, SAP Ariba represents an “occasional” competitor to Yooz. SAP Ariba offers strong e-invoicing and payment capabilities (including payment handling and top tier invoice matching). In addition, it is well known for its supplier onboarding capabilities and has made a business out of supplier network growth and supplier enablement. It now also offers lighter-weight integration (without supplier fees) for its P2P capability, direct materials enablement (SAP Ariba Supply Chain Collaboration) and an SMB offering, SNAP, which competes against Yooz in the AP automation area (and broader procure-to-pay).

Oracle Procurement and Financials (payables) Cloud appears less frequently than SAP Ariba in competitive situations in P2P but has material market share overall — Oracle is pushing hard on cloud, especially for e-procurement and invoice-to-pay (where it has two strong products). As noted, its procure-to-pay offering (procurement and payables) delivers strong functional results in the Q4 2019 SolutionMap benchmark. Oracle is competitive today with Yooz in the AP automation and broader invoice-to-pay areas within all Oracle accounts.

Tipalti of San Mateo, California, is an accounts payables cloud solution with over $8 billion of transaction volume and over 4 million suppliers. Its solution focuses on B2B Payments, Accounts Payable, Mass Payments, International Payments, and invoice management.

It’s KPMG certified tax compliance and invoice processing to global payments, early payments and instant payment reconciliation. Tipalti also has invested in its supplier management capabilities with built-in intelligence that uses 26,000 global payment rules to support the account payment processing.

Tipalti competes directly with Yooz in all markets as both are specialized AP automation solution providers within the SME and LE space.

Medius (Wax Digital) is a cloud-based solution for AP invoice automation that handles invoices from receipt to payment. It handles direct and indirect material invoices with close integration to ERP systems for a high level of automation of even more complex invoice scenarios.

Medius competes in the I2P and AP automation markets. Through its acquisition of Wax Digital, it will be able to compete in a broader S2P and S2C markets.

Its integration capabilities include integration with 80+ ERPs and roughly 17+ PO-systems. It also has multiple capture systems, multiple e-invoicing networks, multiple EDI solutions, punch-out shops, VAT clearance systems (Trustweaver) and archive solutions.

Over 80% of its client base is in the SME space, competing directly with Yooz as an AP automation cloud solution.