Capturing the $90T in AR/AP payments by extending beyond payment execution

FINANCIAL SERVICES CO

Problem Space

How might ‘Financial Services Co’ capitalize on the large B2B supply chain payment space in order to diversify their business reach?

Project type

Supply Chain

Project Status

🚀 Funded to launch venture

Impact

• Evaluated 100+ ideas within this opportunity space and prioritized one initiative to start

• Secured funding to create POC

Timeline

6 months

Team

Executive Team

UX Manager & Senior Designer

2 Engineers

4 Business Consultants

Key Activities

  • Executive workshop

  • Exploratory User Research

  • 40 person remote ideation workshop

  • Qualitative and quantitative concept testing

  • Value driven prioritization of single concept

  • Sponsor Check-ins

  • Product Design

  • Brand Development

  • Capability Building

  • Usability Testing

  • Wizard of Oz Testing

  • Executive pitch w/demo video

76% of companies are dissatisfied with their current supplier sourcing methods. It can take days to weeks to manually find and assess supplier fit using fragmented & outdated information. These slow, imperfect processes impact quality, speed, cost and risk, slowing down the ability to generate revenue.

Project Phases

🔎 Search

• We selected the search space: B2B non-card

💡 Discover

• Conduct user interviews with potential customers

• Spot future growth and innovative opportunities

• Developed service blueprint

🧑‍💻 Create

• Define the value proposition and validate critical assumptions with iterative test & learn

• Evaluate the tool against desirability, viability, strategy & feasibility

🛠️ Build

• Build/buy a business or integrate with partner

• Tested value propositions through marketing tests

🚀 Scale

• Bring business to market

• Grow and scale a venture into a valuable business

Target Personas

Our team embarked on a research-driven journey to create detailed user personas, ensuring that our product strategy aligned with real-world pain points.

User Research: Understanding Needs

To ensure our proposed solutions align with user needs, we conducted in-depth research to explore how they fit into the day-to-day workflows of buyers and suppliers. Our focus was on identifying key elements required to make the future state journey a reality, while considering mental models that influence decision-making and product interactions.

Methodology

  • Participants: 7 Buyers & 5 Suppliers from mid-to-large enterprise companies

  • Session Type: 1-hour co-creation sessions featuring card sorting and lo-fi UI concept validation

Key Questions Explored:

  • Is the MVP desirable, usable, and satisfactory for our target users?

  • What design elements are essential for adoption and success?

  • How do users' mental models shape their expectations?

Speed & Quality Data is of High Importance for Sourcing

Buyer participants ranked the following data elements by importance when finding a new supplier. Findings helped inform product strategy, information priority, search functionality and help refine mental models. They also mentioned that verifying credentials ahead of time and speed to RFP would increase adoption of this tool.

"The main challenge I have is I get a ton of purchase requests and recommendations on where I should buy from. If you can search by vetted & approved vendors you used in the past, that would be extremely useful. I have a lot of folders, a lot of info scattered, I have to do a new search every time. Here if it's automated, that's going to save me a lot of time."

- Jim, Procurement Manager, Manufacturing

Mapping the procurement journey

Creating a seamless procurement experience requires a deep understanding of both buyers and suppliers, their interactions, and the touchpoints that shape their journey. We developed a comprehensive service blueprint to visualize the end-to-end procurement process, identifying key pain points, inefficiencies, and opportunities for optimization.

Wizard of Oz Testing

In order to quickly market test the concept along with various value props, we created a microsite, launched a series of digital ad campaigns which targeted both buyers & suppliers and ran the test over a 3 week timeframe.

169,587 audience reached

8,575 unique visitors

387 contact form starts

78 form submissions

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Buyers favored efficiency and risk reduction value prop messaging; suppliers favored efficiency and increased leads messaging

  • On both the buyer and supplier side, performance was similar across all user roles, with procurement decision makers leading buyers, and supply chain leading suppliers.

Meet SupplierSync

A robust supplier directory that significantly enhances the sourcing process with a powerful recommendation engine that identifies “best fit” suppliers to support any business. Whether you need one local supplier or dozens across the globe, you’ll find them in a matter of minutes with SupplierSync. Through SupplierSync, buyers no longer need to perform lengthy searches to find reputable suppliers for their business.

By creating this double-sided marketplace, Financial Services Co is now able to be the main facilitator when it comes to capturing payments across the value chain.

Outcomes

  • Next 6 month investment made by newly created Innovation Board

  • Successful capability transfer to client teams empowered to drive organization change, demonstrated by additional venture started in parallel

  • Delivered Innovation Playbook to client for repeat capabilities

  • Achieved delivery of validated designs within six month timeframe for MVP development kick off