As we leave brat summer and head into demure fall, we’re now faced with our yearly autumnal favorites: pumpkin spice lattes, Tim Burton movies, and Tipalti’s annual Illuminate conference.
For four years, we’ve been coming together to talk all things finance. In 2022, we hosted Moneyball icon Billy Beane, who hailed the importance of technology in finance. In 2023, top industry leaders explored how finance and technology will impact one another over the long term. Now, we’re bringing it back to the people who actually use that technology in their day-to-day lives—our customers.
Current States Affect Future Visions
Make no mistake about it—over the past year, we’ve been through it. There were some notable social highs, like re-ignited Olympic enthusiasm and a sudden obsession with a bespectacled pommel horse gymnast. And there were some economic lows as the US continued to inch towards a recession, even as inflation started to come down.
Chen Amit touched on some of these economic struggles in his Illuminate CEO keynote—reiterating that “while we’re all hopeful that we’re on the way out of this situation, we’re still not there.”
Calling out a few critical indicators, such as a reactive stock market, selective investors, and compressed valuation multiples, Chen speculated that uncertainty might remain. However, he remained optimistic, citing how this environment is influencing today’s finance leaders to spend every dollar wisely—paving the way for both present and future growth.
Another takeaway was how the current industry landscape is informing the development of Tipalti’s own product solutions. Now more than ever, Tipalti remains laser-focused on the three core pillars of our product strategy: breadth, depth, and simplicity. By investing in these key areas, we aim to remove common operational hurdles for our customers so that they can focus on the strategic priorities that matter most.
Product Innovation Continues: Introducing Tipalti Home
Like most companies, we love the drama of a good reveal. In 2021, we introduced our procurement technology. In 2022, we added corporate credit cards to our product suite. In 2023, we showcased an expense management solution employees would love using. Now, we’re unveiling an integrated experience for the whole finance automation portfolio.
Focused on depth, Tipalti Home allows you to manage everything Tipalti all in one place. Approving bills, submitting expenses, requesting purchases, and tracking statuses are all centralized within Home. As Roby Baruch recounts in his Illuminate product keynote, “this truly reflects Tipalti’s innovation, combining holistic workflows, AI technology, and an intuitive user experience.”
Combining our powerful products—accounts payable, expenses, card, and procurement—into a single interface, Home is the one place where Tipalti customers can manage their entire finance operation.
Tipalti Solutions in Action
With a contagious passion for product, Home was just one Illuminate reveal. Committed to building breadth throughout our core technology suite, the product team continued to explore Tipalti’s present and future automation enhancements in their individual Illuminate sessions.
With a goal to remove inefficient, manual workflows for our customers, these were just some of the product highlights across Tipalti’s accounts payable, mass payments, procurement, expenses, and card solutions.
What to Look Forward To:
- Paying invoices that accept credit card payments automatically
- Translating the Tipalti Hub into any language, starting with German, with additional European languages to be added soon
- New local payment routes in the Nordics and Canada, with more countries on the way
- Instant payments and expanding local payment routes
- Robust vendor renewal management capabilities
- Catalogs that manage the items employees can browse when purchasing
- Punchouts to streamline the employee buying process even further
- Expense submission through tools like Google Photos, WhatsApp, or Slack
- Global expansion of cards to the UK and EU
- Global expansion of expenses to the EU
This Illuminate, we wanted to delve even deeper into our product and provide more resources on how to maximize the Tipalti experience. Curious about how Tipalti’s finance team leverages our technology day-to-day? There’s a video for that. Want to reduce compliance risk? Let’s ask the experts. Whether you’re already a Tipalti power user or aspire to be one, we’ve got the tips and tricks for you.
Generative AI Hasn’t Left the Conversation
As oversaturated as the buzzword has become, artificial intelligence fatigue hasn’t quite set in yet. People are still wondering how AI is changing the finance industry and if they should succumb now to our eventual robot overlords.
The truth isn’t nearly as exciting as Isaac Asimov would lead you to believe, but AI is still very much a part of the conversation. Today, AI innovations are a prominent aspect of most SaaS products on the market, and Tipalti is no different. But, our strategy centers on the innovative ways we can use that technology to build simplicity into our solutions.
Some Highlights Include:
- An AI-guided procurement process, start a request by simply telling Tipalti’s co-pilot what is needed, and AI will pull the correct suppliers, ledger codes, and approval workflows automatically
- A Smart Report builder, harness the power of AI to streamline report generation across all Tipalti products
- An AI-powered chat, instant support, and guidance, whether for technical assistance, product information, or troubleshooting
Additionally, Glenn Hopper, a tech-focused CFO and lead of AI resource and development at Eventus, continued the conversation in an Illuminate session on the transformative impact of generative AI in the finance and accounting industry—a can’t-miss discussion that directly impacts today’s finance professionals.
Celebrating the People Beyond the Product
It wouldn’t be an Illuminate conference without highlighting the partners and customers that Tipalti works alongside every day.
One of our partners, NetSuite, recently named Tipalti “NetSuite’s 2024 SuiteCloud Growth Partner of the Year,” which recognizes our meaningful investment in the partnership year over year. It was an honor to receive the award, and it reminded us just how important our partners are to the success of Tipalti. This theme continued at Illuminate, where we announced the recipient of Tipalti’s 2024 Partner of the Year award and other partner award categories in Chen Amit and Zach Svendsen’s keynotes.
In that same session, we celebrated the outstanding contributions of our customers with Tipalti’s 2024 Customer Awards. Recognizing those who have gone above and beyond in transforming their financial operations, Chen revealed the four customers who received the Finance Automation Award, the Finance Innovation Award, the Mass Payments Award, and the Global Finance Pioneer Award.
All of our partners and customers are a testament to the power of innovation, partnership, and dedication. As Chen expressed, “with our partners and customers’ support, it’s clear that the future of finance automation is bright.”
Next-Gen Finance Starts Here
Well, that’s a wrap for Tipalti’s 2024 Illuminate conference, but don’t worry—the new year is just around the corner. Will AI be as prominent in 2025 as it is today? Will finance professionals once again have to adapt to changing markets? Will there be another Barbenheimer moment, and will the box office ever recover to what it once was?
No doubt, all these questions and more will be explored at Tipalti’s next Illuminate conference, but until then, we have plenty of insights on how breadth, depth, and simplicity are driving the future of finance automation.
Be sure to catch up on all Illuminate 2024 sessions on demand and uncover the next generation of finance solutions.
