Catching up with Jeff Weinstein, CEO of TranscendAP, Transforming Accounts Payable
In May NJTechweekly.com learned that New Jersey serial entrepreneur Jeff Weinstein had spun out a startup from Optima Global Solutions (Lawrenceville) in January. The startup, TranscendAP (Hamilton), which specializes in accounts payment automation, was previously a business unit of Optima. Mahesh Yadav, Optima founder and CEO, is a TranscendAP cofounder.
We recently spoke to Weinstein, who sold his Edison-based startup RightAnswers in 2017, about this new venture. Previously president of Calamu (Clinton) and chief growth officer at Traliant (New York), which was acquired by Providence Equity Partners (Providence, R.I.), Weinstein has also advised hundreds of New Jersey students and startups in his capacity as senior mentor at TechLaunch (Kinnelon) and as executive in residence at Monmouth University (West Long Branch).
TranscendAP has developed innovative accounts payable (AP) technology that provides a flexible and scalable software platform supporting complex AP workflows and processes.
Our Q&A starts here, edited for clarity:
What did you see in this business that made you want to get involved?
I had been consulting with Optima before the spin-off, and it was clear to see how our clients were successful. They believed they had made a good choice. Our platform was automating a lot of functions that other organizations in this space were having trouble accomplishing. That really resonated with me.
This category [accounts payable] has not had much investment around innovation. It seems to have been viewed more as a cost center than an area that can help run the business better and, as a result, didn’t get the internal investments. After doing the research, we found that there is an incredibly high percentage of organizations that have not fully automated their environments. It’s a market that’s ready to be dusted off and reinvigorated.
Also, I have experience incorporating customer success programs that help clients get the most out of a technology platform, which I believe fits very well into this market. How do you complement a great tech platform with great client success programs that are focused on clients being more productive in their own organization? Many accounts payable tech companies in this environment have been more about throwing the product over the wall, and not about collaborating with clients to help them through this journey. We want to be a partner to our clients.
This is one of those markets that I think is all about the combination of the right innovation, the right execution and the right amount of care. If you deliver on those three things, clients will be very happy with their investment in us.
Could you elaborate on how you are collaborating with your clients?
About 85 percent of accounts payable operate in the very similar manner, but for each client, about 15-20 percent is different, depending on the industry and the client’s preferences. Some want to do EDI [Electronic Data Interchange] with their customers and others don’t. Most have a unique workflow, and some are very complex. Those are the types of things we are addressing with our platform. It is incredibly flexible, and allows us to configure it to specific clients’ unique needs, so they don’t have to forfeit anything.
What will be different from an AP manager’s point of view?
AP managers get bombarded by vendors asking them when they’re going to be paid. And on the other side, they are continually trying to track down their fellow employees who must approve invoices before they can be paid. And that puts the AP team right in the middle because the vendors are angry with them and their internal people are also being bothered constantly. It is understandable, as the entire team does not have all the mechanisms in place to manage approvals efficiently. I tell managers: You get enough grief that the movement to automation should not be adding to the grief, but it should be alleviating it.
Using our platform should take care of these issues. It will help speed invoices through the system. We provide a vendor-supplier portal so that vendors and suppliers can actually see where their invoices are in the payment process. It also allows them to submit invoices, and if their invoices are not correct, it allows our customer to collaborate with the vendor, so the vendor can fix the invoice. Whereas before, the way it was working was the invoice would go in, the AP team would try to get it routed, the routing would fail. And then, you know, a week or two later, somebody would say to the supplier, hey, you got to resubmit the invoice. With our vendor-collaboration environment, invoices can be managed, tracked, given visibility and more easily processed.
How is TranscendAP using AI in its platform?
At the most fundamental level, we use AI machine learning to read and more effectively decipher invoices that get submitted. So, invoices get submitted in different ways, and we’re using AI and machine learning to dissect that and learn from previous invoices from that vendor. We are already getting in the high 90 percents for reconciliation and ingestion resolution. In the future, we are going to be using AI to enhance our fraud-detection capabilities. We already have many of these features, but AI can make them better. We’re also going to use AI on the vendor risk profile side, figuring out which vendors are more at risk, because maybe they’re supplying materials late or they’re supplying poor-quality materials. We will be able to tell our customers that maybe they should be looking at a different vendor based on a number of different factors. We are really focused on developing streamlined purpose-built AI and machine learning, specifically as they pertain to AP automation.
How will spinning TranscendAP out as a new company change its business?
We have customers right now, from maybe 20,000 invoices to a million invoices a year that they’re trying to manage. We are tightly focused on companies in the $75 million to $7 billion range. We definitely don’t want to be in the low end of the market, but we are not going after the incredibly large end, right? Universities are a good space for us. Manufacturing is a great space for us. For example, Wynn Casinos is one of our clients. Consumer Reports, Teradata and Kaiser Aluminum are all clients. We have customers in all shapes and sizes.
What’s next for TranscendAP?
We continue to grow the platform in a number of directions, adding greater functionality around advanced fraud-detection concepts. We want to continually expand our supplier/vendor portal, and continually improve upon our analytics. In growing the business, we are building strong relationships with ERP vendors and integrators, in the higher ed and in the general manufacturing spaces. And then to bring this all together, expand our Client Success Services so all the work we are doing and lessons we are learning can be provided to our clients, so they can take advantage of new capabilities and best practices. This allows us to showcase our domain expertise and enables us to help clients move along the spectrum to be more efficient.
