Teampay

它的作用

Teampay provides tools for a business’ employees to request or independently purchase goods and services with predefined limitations. One could describe this as a “modern” variation on e-procurement. Instead of a centralized procurement function building a catalog of approved items or service providers to use, employees in various functions identify and purchase what they need or seek approvals based on certain business rules.

实际上，这使得Teampay最适合应用于服务类别和尾部支出，允许最终用户进行采购或财务部门可能没有多少时间进行有效管理的重复性或一次性购买。Teampay尤其强调其支持SaaS订阅等服务购买的能力，这是一个不断增加的支出类别，企业越来越难以控制。

See ourfull review of Teampay关于支出问题。

我们为什么选择它

The term “spend management” may have originated in the early days of the internet, but the number of solutions purporting to address business spending, whether procurement-controlled or in general, continues to expand into the 2020s. And in the past several years, we’ve begun to see some fresh takes on what spend management could be — that is, not just catalog-based e-procurement or e-auctions. In particular, we’ve seen several vendors emerge that aim to simplify the process of finding, ordering and paying for items and services for end users, while enabling them to buy in a more self-service manner.

Tempay就是这样一种解决方案，它的几个特性为该提供商所说的“分布式支出管理”提供了令人信服的理由它能够支持直观、对话式的申请和自动支付，同时将最终用户限制在灵活的业务规则范围内，创造了无缝的用户体验，这可能是许多企业级同行羡慕的。

And given the challenges of managing a distributed workforce in 2020, we think of the choice of Teampay for this year’s Future 5 as a sign of the times. Investors think so, too: After having raised an initial Series A round in 2019, Teampay announced a Series A-1 extension of $5 million in October 2020, bringing its total funding to $21 million. Take it as sign of real momentum in the procurement-finance overlap space, as well as the alluring potential of creating easily usable solutions that appeal to the largely underserved SME market.

Any threats or challenges ahead?

There are two scenarios we think Teampay will need to address as it continues to scale: the growing glut of other similar vendors and the potential threat of P2P suites going “downmarket” with lite versions of their platforms.

For similarly sized competitors, Teampay has a fair amount of company. Examples include Airbase, Spendesk, Evergreen, Yaydoo, Yordex and Approve.com. Each of these vendors does something slightly different, but there is an odd amount of overlap in requisition management and virtual card provisioning. And perhaps more surprising still, several of these vendors are also gaining investor attention. On the one hand, this may indicate that this represents a fertile opportunity; on the other, it creates additional challenges for each vendor to differentiate and stand out from the crowd.

然后是P2P威胁。Coupa、Basware和其他P2P顶级公司拥有更先进的功能和更好的资金，可以用来创建面向中端市场的“lite”版本的工具。这听起来可能有些牵强，但考虑到解决服务不足的中小企业细分市场的市场机会，这确实是一种可能性。

Still, Teampay has an early lead in defining and growing in this “spend management next” segment. Plus the vendor is actively addressing its own competitive threats. In our PRO analysis, we listed the rise of Amazon Business as a competitive threat, but the Teampay recently announced a partnership to use Amazon Business’ capabilities as a catalog management and content provider. This proactive mindset could be just what Teampay needs to differentiate itself, and it’s why the vendor is a Future 5 nominee for 2020.