These announcements deliver on Coupa’s vision of creating a comprehensive cloud platform for businesses to spend smarter, simpler, and safer at every transactional step of their Business Spend Management strategy.

“For far too long, businesses have been forced to deal with a complicated and labor-intensive payments experience, and we purpose-built Coupa Pay to address this challenge,” said Rajiv Ramachandran, vice president of product strategy at Coupa. “Today’s announcement is another step forward in realizing our vision of one platform to manage all business spend, including payments. It’s now even easier for the BSM community to manage payments seamlessly with their other business spend processes so everyone is spending and paying smarter.”

Seamless and Secure Digital Payments Globally

Research shows that 50 percent of companies are still paying their suppliers manually, and 40 percent of business-to-business payments in the U.S. are still done by paper check.[1] Today’s dynamic, global environment requires businesses to move and transact quickly, both domestically and abroad. Yet with so many different payment rails – each requiring its own unique ERP connection and manual authorization process – Accounts Payable (AP) teams are inundated with time-consuming, tactical work to manage these transactions.

With Coupa Pay Invoice Payments, AP teams are now empowered to efficiently transact in one secure step, seamlessly, through a wide variety of payment options, including domestic bank transfer, cross-border payment, and digital checks. With this solution, companies can now orchestrate and govern their end-to-end payments processes with a unified platform, thereby reducing manual work, compliance risk, and fraud.

"Moving invoice payments to Coupa was an easy decision for Odonate as we work to unify all of our business spend and payments processes within one unified platform,” said Alison Bussett senior director, accounting and controller at Odonate. “Before Coupa Pay, there were many time-consuming steps that our team had to take to pay our suppliers. With Coupa Pay, the process is now much simpler and we’ve gained time back to focus on more strategic projects that are valuable to the business.”

Innovative Partnerships to Pay Simpler
In partnership with TransferMate, one of the largest global payments technology providers, Coupa Pay will now offer payments technology and access to TransferMate’s domestic payments capabilities across dozens of countries as well as cross-border payments in more than 100-plus countries and currencies. TransferMate’s regulatory money movement rails are seamlessly connected with Coupa Invoice Payments providing businesses with a global, unified platform to manage their payments.

“TransferMate’s payment technology, combined with Coupa’s best-in-class BSM platform, provides customers with a comprehensive global payment experience, delivering cost savings, increased speed, and immediate reconciliation,” said Sinead Fitzmaurice, CEO at TransferMate, a Taxback Group company. “Our payments technology has been selected by some of the world’s leading banks, including Wells Fargo, ING Group, and AIB, and we are now delighted to collaborate with Coupa.”

This is one of a number of innovative payments partnerships that Coupa will announce at its Inspire’19 conference, each aimed at empowering buyers and suppliers to spend and pay smarter together.  

The investigation relates to ‘typosquatting’, where a well-known online cryptocurrency exchange is ‘spoofed’, or recreated to imitate the genuine site, to gain access to victims’ Bitcoin wallets, stealing their login details and funds.

At least 4 000 victims in 12 countries were fooled by the bogus Websites. More are expected to emerge following forensic investigation of electronic devices siezed during the raid.

The arrested individuals are suspected of having committed computer misuse act offences and money laundering.

This has created opportunities for independent ATM deployers (IADs) operating with a lower cost deployment model. IADs have expanded their estates, taking advantage of the availability of sites following the removal or sale of bank ATMs. An example of this is in Ireland, where banks have downsized their branch networks and new IADs have entered the market. In 2018 alone, the number of IAD terminals in Ireland grew by 72%, whilst the total number of ATMs installed in the country fell as banks rationalised their estates. This trend is mirrored elsewhere, including Brazil, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain.

Over half of the world’s IAD ATMs are found in North America - the largest proportion is found in Canada, where 70% of terminals are deployed by non-banks. The report reveals that IADs account for the majority of ATMs in six markets - Australia, Canada, Israel, Poland, UK and the USA - with a presence in a further 35 countries, representing two thirds of the largest markets covered in the study.

Non-banks play an important role in financial inclusion

Traditionally, strict regulation has inhibited the growth of non-bank ATMs in some countries, for example where IADs have been required to enter partnerships with banks in order to deploy terminals. However, RBR’s study finds that this is not always the case, and there are examples where regulatory activity has helped boost non-bank deployment. In India and Argentina, for example, regulators have encouraged the provision of financial services for underserved communities, and this has contributed to IAD growth in more rural areas.

IADs forecast to gain share around the world

RBR forecasts that in most of the markets where IADs are present, they will gain share over the next few years. The Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland and Slovakia in particular are projected to see significant rises in the share of IAD ATMs. Furthermore, the first IAD ATMs are expected to be deployed in Pakistan in 2019, following the central bank’s recent decision to allow such entities to operate in the country.

Rowan Berridge, who led RBR’s Global ATM Market and Forecasts to 2024 research, commented “IADs continue to make gains in share in a wide range of markets around the world, and we expect this trend to continue. Banks are increasingly cutting back their ATM deployment, with IADs often stepping in to fill the gaps left behind”.