Offering control and transparency over companies’ spending decisions: Interview with Itamar Jobani, CEO at PayEm

By Gaia Lamperti

In the aftermath of Covid-19, finance teams have been through challenging times to keep up with the changes posed by the new remote or hybrid workforce. PayEm, the global spend and procurement platform for high-growth and multinational organisations, helps streamline finance processes, from request to reconciliation, automating manual accounting tasks, and allowing finance teams to remain agile and in control of employees’ spending.

IBSi recently met with Itamar Jobani, the company’s CEO, to discuss PayEm’s recent Seed and Series A funding rounds which secured $27 million. The company has demonstrated hyper-growth in Q2’21, growing its total portfolio value by 4x and generating millions of dollars in revenue.

Let’s start with the funding rounds. Who were the main investors and how will the money be invested?

Sure, the Seed was led by Pitango First and NFX with the participation of LocalGobe, which is a British FinTech VC and Fresh Fund and was actually our first institutional investment. Recently, right after the Seed, we were offered to do the Series A and we got an excellent offer from Glilot Capital, they led the round with the participation of all the prior investors. So, our main focus now is a very ambitious product roadmap, we are also doubling down on our R&D operation. Our plan is to reach almost four or five folds of the employee count that we have, mainly increasing our R&D team, but also our go-to-market team which is sales and marketing.

What are some of the upcoming expansion plans for the company in terms of new geographies and partnerships?

We are now focusing on building the customer-facing team in the United States and setting up operations in Europe as well. One of the unique aspects of our offering is that we focus on mid-market companies and they tend to operate in many different territories, unlike small businesses that usually are very local. So, for us, it’s very important that we know how to serve those companies in all their territories so that they will have the same experience whether they are working in their entity in Europe or in the States or in the Middle East and so on. Many companies expand to new territories because they feel like they’ve saturated, for us is more like answering to the mid-market need.  

As we are talking about international businesses, let’s focus on cross-border payments. What are some of the sector’s inherent complexities and how is PayEm providing solutions to overcome them?

I don’t necessarily see them as cross-border transaction problems, but more linked to multi-territory operations. Think about some of our customers, like JFrog or Fiverr, which are publicly traded companies, and they have entities in 5, 6, 7 different territories now. They had a few options when it comes to managing their long tail spend, they could set up a bank account and a credit card account in each of those territories. But that means that at the end of each month they would have to log into a different bank account and download the transactions and integrate them into the ERP system, and they would have to have a different approval process for each employee. If an employee would ask for a card, then they’d have to log into that specific bank and issue the card and so on. So, what we’re doing is allowing them to issue cards in every territory so that each entity could basically have the autonomy of getting their own billing statement and paying from their local bank in their local currency. At the same time, the organisation is operating in a very holistic way which means that it’s the same process for all the employees, no matter where. Also, from an accounting perspective, you can have your finance teams digesting the transactions that are happening in different territories with one automation system for all the territories. That doesn’t mean that we’re not supporting different accounting styles, there would be an accounting style that is very common in Europe, another accounting style that is very common in the States, but they have the same process which is very important from the company’s perspective. 

And what are the benefits for the employees?

Well, they don’t need to go to their bank for card operations, they don’t need to go to expense management to do expenses, and then they don’t need to go through a procurement platform to do procurement. So, we’re consolidating a few different services into one process, and I think from the employee perspective, it’s a very streamlined process and in today’s world, especially in tech, the employees’ experience is super important. Also, from the finance operation perspective, having one process for all those points of contact and not having to deal with like 7 different providers, is making their life so much easier.  

How did PayEm transform or adapt its services in light of the pandemic and remote working?

During Covid, when 100% of the workforce was remote, a lot of processes that were done in the past like give me your credit card or sign here in the field are just not working anymore. So, this is what we’re seeing, companies basically need to rewrite their operations and we are here to support them. I think there is a trend that started, maybe like 15 or 10 years ago, a shift from a very centralised way of running spend to a more democratised way of doing it. And if you think about companies 20 years ago, then most of their spending would go through the procurement and finance team in a centralised way and the problem that they were facing was mostly a sourcing problem, finding the right vendors and negotiating good deals with them. Since SaaS started, there are basically way more vendors than a modern organisation will deal with. Another thing that is shifted is that the procurements and finance teams are not the ones who are making the decision of what to buy because you’re not necessarily buying chairs and fabric to manufacture, but you are buying services now, and the ones who understand what services need to be bought is the actual team. What we’re seeing today, especially in tech, is that you’re letting the team make the decisions and that, sometimes, in the same company you have many different vendors for the same service, as they have different processes and they want to work with different providers that fit them.

How can achieving a faster end of the month process be beneficial not only to the finance team but to the company at large?

Some of our companies, the publicly traded ones, can take up to six weeks from the moment an employee asks for an expense to be made until it is approved. And this is because, of course, there are a lot of elements in place to protect the company from fraud and the need to be compliant. But imagine an employee who wants to get something done and has to wait six weeks to get a subscription in place so they can start using a service. So, we bring them a tool that can speed that up into two days, and managers can look at the request of an employee and see in real-time how much of the budget that has been approved and allocated for that particular service they have left. So, it’s not just about optimising finance operation, it’s about optimising the organisation, making it more agile to respond faster to changes. And, you know, in general, finance is somehow the framework of how you work and if financials are faster, we are helping the whole organisation to work in a more efficient way.