Welcome back to series 3 of the Procuretech Podcast!

We bring you the hottest startups, thought leadership and conversation from visionary industry experts, and definitely no stiff corporate content.

We’re switching things up a bit for the new series. 

We’ll now be releasing episodes twice weekly, and expanding our scope on guests. In the past we’d typically speak to startup founders, CEOs or CMOs of procurement tech companies. But we're now going to be talking to industry leaders and influencers in this space too. We’ll bring you their thoughts, opinions and projections around digital transformation of procurement. 

So without any more delay, let’s jump into this episode’s conversation with a guest from the finance community: Chris Argent, of GenerationCFO.

 
Procurement and Finance: Natural Allies? – Chris Argent from GenerationCFO
Finance and procurement are often sparring partners, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Chris and I recently met a P2P transformation conference in London, where the message was that procurement and finance are really natural allies.

 
Chris’s 20+ year journey in finance 
Chris’s journey began as a financial controller and finance director in small to medium sized organisations. There was a key moment when he stumbled across a fraud that had been committed due to poor systems and poor technology. This inspired Chris to enter the finance transformation arena. 

There, he was lucky enough to work with some big players including John Lewis, Amazon and Vodafone. This opened his eyes to shared services and procurement technology. Chris became more tech savvy, and saw the future of what we now know as digital procurement on the horizon. But this was maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and the people around him didn’t understand all this new technology. 

This need to educate people was the birth of GenerationCFO. It all began as a LinkedIn group. And now, some 19 years later, GenerationCFO has a reach of about 100,000 people who all gather regularly to talk about these transformation issues.

This community is predominantly UK-focused, but there are members all over the world - from Europe to the US and Asia.

An experienced perspective on finance transformation
Chris shares some observations from his long-standing career in this space. What have the main trends been over his time in the industry? And where do procurement tech and FinTech crossover?