• Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder at Tipalti


• 11.07.2017 11:26 am

An interview with Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder of Tipalti. 

Financial IT: Could you please tell us more about Tipalti and your career path that brought you to launching Tipalti?

Chen: I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I love identifying problems that are calling for solutions and building businesses to do just that. Prior to starting Tipalti, I was CEO of a telecom equipment company that I sold to Nokia-Siemens.

After that success, a good friend of mine, Oren Zeev, from business school reached out to me with a business opportunity. One of the portfolio businesses he had invested in, a global ad network, was struggling to send mass payments to his publishers and partners around the world. After doing some due diligence, I realized how complex and common this problem was and how it was causing significant pain to businesses around the world -- and an issue that I could help solve.

Prior to starting Tipalti, I had no experience within the payments industry, which surprisingly made me an ideal fit for this problem. I was able to approach the issue with an entrepreneurial mindset, without the constraints of the old conventions from banking and payments. Tipalti was that result.

Financial IT: How would you define the Tipalti’s goals for broadening and driving the growth of the financial services industry? What is in your focus right now?

Chen: At Tipalti, our unwavering goal is simplifying and modernizing the way companies manage their entire global supplier payments operation. We liberate finance from the minutiae of accounts payable processes so that they can help their business’ scale and grow efficiently. Since our launch in 2010, we’ve developed a deep and growing base of amazing customers that includes some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Amazon, GoDaddy, GoPro, Vimeo, Indeed.com, Roku, Houzz, Nikon, Zumba, Seeking Alpha, and Twitter. We’ve experienced near-perfect customer retention in our seven years of operation and now process almost $3 billion in annual payment transactions and serve 1.5 million suppliers throughout platform.

Financial IT: What are the trends you are mostly excited about and what do you foresee next for payments industry?

Chen: As the nature of business rapidly changes, it becomes increasingly important for CFOs to build finance infrastructure and teams that can adapt to the company’s changing needs. Because of this, the adoption of Fintech solutions to automate their manual processes will accelerate. They will increasingly replace traditional banking institutions and outdated payment methods with more optimized, efficient, and modern options. The global supply chain and increasing regulatory scrutiny will force even more changes in financial operations..

Financial IT: How does Tipalti harness innovation to address these challenges and trends?

Chen: No other business has combined advanced AP business process automation technology with a global remittance solution. This enables Tipalti to provide one holistic cloud-based solution to automate the entire global AP and supplier payments workflow, while also protecting businesses from fraud, audit, and compliance risks. The system encompasses all core AP processes, including supplier management, tax compliance, invoice processing, AML/OFAC checking, remittance to any country in a wide variety of payment options and 120+ currencies, early payments, and finally payment reconciliation and AP reporting. Our typical customer eliminates 80% of the workload they previously spent managing this process. A CFO can now essentially depend on Tipalti to manage their entire AP operation while improving their financial controls and visibility. It enables staff to spend less time (often a matter of minutes per day) on dealing with supplier payments, and dedicate more effort towards strategic or analytical initiatives.

Financial IT: Going forward what are the major plans you have for Tipalti?

Chen: While Tipalti is already solving many of the challenges finance leads face when managing their payments operations, we are always broadening and deepening our end-to-end system to streamline our customer’s finance processes. We recently announced several major product capabilities: Early Payments Automation and Multi-Entity Management that further enrich the platform. We have several new innovations for the rest of the year, so stay tuned.

Chen Amit is the CEO and co-founder of automated global payments supplier Tipalti, as well as a veteran high-tech executive and repeat entrepreneur.