“Basically we consider that modern business is broken,” began Christian Lanng, CEO and co-founder of Tradeshift as we asked him what the company is all about. Because it believes modern business is broken, Tradeshift helps companies run more efficiently, by providing them with a platform for all their business interactions. PYMNTS.com spoke with the company’s co-founder and CEO to find out more.
PYMNTS.com: For those who don’t’ know, what is Tradeshift and what do you do?
Christian Lanng: Tradeshift is a platform for all your business interactions. Basically we consider that modern business is broken. You have small businesses going bankrupt from cashflow issues and large enterprises spending a fortune struggling to manage the millions of documents they exchange with those suppliers every year. The two problems are linked.
The issue is that everyone else who has tried to address that problem with an electronic solution has tried to charge every company involved for the software. What then happens is that many of the smaller businesses refuse to sign up, the enterprise never sees the ROI it could and the opportunity to connect every business together on one platform is lost. Things go on as usual.
Tradeshift changes this by providing free accounts to all those suppliers, removing the disincentive for them to join their enterprises on the platform. It is also built on open standards, meaning anyone can build Apps for those small businesses to activate and use on Tradeshift. That includes everything from connectors to their accounting/ payments system or apps like Duedil and The Currency Cloud to entirely new functions like quotes, POs and data visualisation.
As a platform for all your business interactions, Tradeshift is creating the world’s largest network of businesses and helping anyone offer and sell Tradeshift Apps that provide enormous value to them.
How did you start Tradeshift?
We co-founders actually started Tradeshift after developing a similar and incredibly successful solution while part of the Danish Government. Like so many organisations, they were looking for a way to work more efficiently with their suppliers around areas like e-invoicing and we helped put together a free open source ebusiness tool that would be available to all. It’s now the universal way for companies to interact with the Government.
After seeing that nobody was trying to solve the problem in the same way globally, expanding the scope globally and trying to change the world seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
What kinds of businesses do you work with?
What makes our work at Tradeshift great is that we can help all businesses. If you’re a global enterprise like our customers MITIE, Kuehne+Nagel and Vestas Wind Systems, managing tens of thousands of suppliers is a huge and costly issue. There are even stories out there of enterprises shipping whole crates of paper invoices to India for manual input. Tradeshift solves that with an electronic solution — and has the best possible uptake among the suppliers because the proposition is clearly attractive for them too.
This last bit means that we also work with over a hundred thousand smaller suppliers who love the platform because managing things electronically makes life easier and helps them get paid faster.
You say you have clients in 190 countries, how do you adapt to the different markets? Do you provide local payment solutions for European companies for example?
Well you have to remember we’re a cloud solution so anyone can create a Tradeshift account anywhere and get started. The most important areas globally then become things like compliance and security, which we take extremely seriously. We’re audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers to make sure we excel on both.
We’re also seeing companies like The Currency Cloud creating Tradeshift Apps that eliminate some of the traditional barriers to global commerce. By integrating its currency conversion directly into the invoicing process, it essentially means that different currencies (and therefore what country you’re being paid from) is almost not a concern at all anymore. Working together becomes easier, no matter where you’re based.
What can we expect from Tradeshift in the coming months?
So already this year we’ve announced the strategic partnership with Intuit, which will bring five million new businesses onto the platform and a range of new Apps and connectors. But what we’ve got coming up soon will really blow even those announcements away.
I’d advise you to keep a close eye on how our product and partners evolve, as well as the scale and kinds of customers that we’ll be finally announcing. The message it sends will be clear: 2013 is the year that the world’s companies, from the biggest enterprises to the smallest suppliers, embrace a shared platform for all their business interactions.
Christian Lanng is CEO and co-founder of Tradeshift. Tradeshift has so far been highly successful, with users in more than 190 countries and more than 2,000 users joining the online network every week. It has been covered by Wired, Techcrunch, Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times as one of the most innovative b2b start-ups in the last 10 years. Christian has received the Danish IT-industry’s innovation prize and the Techcrunch award for most innovative business start-up.