Ariba Names Fastest-Growing Procure-To-Pay Market

Procure-to-pay service provider Ariba has just named what it sees as its fastest-growing market: Asia.

The company, which launched its B2B payments service AribaPay several years ago in collaboration with Discover, pointed to this market in recent reports published by CFO Innovation.

The Wednesday (Dec. 30) article highlighted a recent interview with Ariba President Alex Atzberger, who told reporters, “Asia is our fastest-growing region in the world. We have very strong growth in Japan. Australia is obviously a core market. And Southeast Asia has been booming as well.”

But the executive also pointed to certain challenges for growth in these regions, including security concerns and the onboarding of new software and technologies for procurement functions of corporations. According to reports, Ariba noted that few companies in Asia have a separate unit solely for procurement and even fewer have a designated chief procurement officer.

[bctt tweet=”Asia is Ariba’s most promising jurisdiction.”]

Still, Asia is Ariba’s most promising jurisdiction, Atzberger said. “Three months ago, I had an advisory board meeting, where I brought together 15 of our most important customers in the U.S. to give advice,” he told the publication. “Out of those 15, five were Asian-based. They actually traveled all the way from Australia to make the two-day meeting in Seattle. And I thought that was a great sign.”

It’s been just over a year since Ariba, an SAP company, revealed that more than $1 billion in payments had been processed through AribaPay, with nearly 1,300 suppliers using the service at that time, since the unit’s launch in 2013.

Earlier this year, Ariba launched a new user interface for its procurement platform.