Corporate Spend Management - with Oded Zehavi, Founder and CEO Mesh Payments

**Ray Reich** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Oded Zehavi, the co-founder and CEO of mesh Payments. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Oded. First, the evolution of spend management overall and in the SaaS industry. Second, the top ideas for implementing a spend management program in 2023 And third, the top ideas for controlling SaaS spend and fast growing companies. Oded, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Oded Zehavi** (1:16)
Hey, happy to be here. I've been a payment geek for many years. Among other, I was the one who started and managed Paypal Middle East in Africa. That was an amazing journey in one of the most amazing, fastest growing payment companies in the world. Then I ran the business for what is in my mind, still considered the most successful global payment company in the world called Payoneer. Then four years ago, we founded mesh Payments. We have been doing a lot of stuff, but finally when Covid started and we'll talk about it, we decided to move into the spend management space and the rest of the story.

**Ray Reich** (1:56)
Let's dig in a little bit to that history, but we're going to start with a foundational, definitional question. Oded, how do you define spend management, especially here in 2023? How do you define it?

**Oded Zehavi** (2:12)
There are so many ways to define spend management. In my mind, the new next generation spend management platforms are really enabling finance team to automate, control and have better visibility on the way that the company is spending what I call the non payroll spend. So usually there are many ways to divide how the focus of finance teams and spend. In my mind, the top level is payroll and non payroll, and we are really focusing on the non payroll spend. Non payroll is a space by itself and with a lot of different challenges. And then when a company needs to spend, we come in in various technologies that enables them in general, they have full control, clear visibility, and all of that was achieved by advanced technology and automation.

**Ray Reich** (3:14)
Yeah, well, let me follow up on that because I grew up at the GE company and we had a corporate procurement card there. Then we started using Concur as a spend management platform. So this is over 20 years ago, Oded. So why has this category become so hot and kind of reinvigorated over the last 12 to 24 months?

**Oded Zehavi** (3:39)
So there are many reasons why spend management has become really one of the hottest topics, especially when it comes to the CFO stock in 2021, and it's still the case. I'm looking at it in a different way that may be others. For me, going back to some of your historical notion, before Covid, spend management was mostly about travel entertainment. So, so many people, mostly salespeople, but not only were traveling. For the finance team, the biggest challenge was how to collect those paper receipts, and that was more or less the chatter in the finance team's desk. Did you upload the receipt? Did you bring the receipt? What do you spend, etc.? I'm not saying it's not a pain, but it's something that can be resolved by a few more employees, usually not too expensive and a lot of noise. Covid have really changed the landscape in a few ways. One, T&E have disappeared overnight, so now no more noise, no more receipts to collect. Finance team have the ability to refocus themselves on problems that are much different, in my mind, bigger than that historical paper receipt collection. Second, Covid have really made the corporate distributed. Before Covid, most companies were centralized in a single geography, usually in a single big building, so a lot of the challenges or processes were solved by people reaching each other and trying to understand or to approve or to do things that provide control.
And when Covid came, companies have become distributed, even more than just distributed, even global. So now we have the same challenges, sometimes more, for the finance team, but everybody in different time zones, different geography, you don't see anybody, and you need to have tools to help you orchestrate that. And last and not least, before Covid, a lot of the company IT infrastructure and technology was on-premise, were very high-date, outdated. Covid really changed and modernized the software infrastructure of most corporates, moved most of it to the cloud, and that brought new challenges from one end. Now, how do you pay for all these recurring SaaS services over month for month? And there are hundreds in average that each company needs to spend. But last and not least, it enabled technology companies like mesh to integrate to more and more operational systems in the organization, collect data that historically was outside of the reach of the finance team, and provide them with insight and help them make better decisions that are now based on real-time data and not from data that is too day old or without control. So the combination of all of that brought sophisticated software companies that have a lot of capabilities when it comes to the global payments to thrive.