Kim Forsman Of Maventa: Customers Are Your Lifeline
In the past few years even the biggest and most traditional organizations have taken steps to modernize their services. In the banking business, E-invoicing is here to stay due to the worldwide incentives to get this working. In the For example in Denmark, Tradeshift has seen a lot of traction with their model. The situation in Finland is slightly different due to the numerous operators offering solutions in this area. One of them is Maventa.
We've covered Maventa in the past as well, back in 2010. Back then we called them the rebel e-invoicing provider and it seems the rebels are taking over "the universe".
Tradeshift Now In Finnish And Dutch
About a month after closing a $7M funding round, Tradeshift is doing better and better. Their platform is now available in Finnish and Dutch languages to attract even more local businesses use the network. 'Of all the European markets we are in, the Netherlands and Finland are among the most mature when it comes to online invoicing', comments Christian Lanng, CEO. 'The adoption of e-invoicing has been driven [there] by the Governments which has resulted in highly competitive e-invoicing markets'. Turns out that even before Tradeshift was translated into Finnish and Dutch, their free e-invoicing model was already being used by businesses of all sizes as an alternative to traditional online invoicing providers.
TradeShift - Free Invoicing And Then Some
Back in March we covered TradeShift, at a time when there wasn't too much information on the company out yet. A few weeks ago, Wall Street Journal dug into the company and found out what they're really up to. The company publicly stated that they're building a free invoicing platform for companies, but while doing so - they're building a Unified Business Language, developers can build more apps on.
Maventa, The Rebel E-Invoicing Provider, Becomes Third Largest Operator In Finland
Maventa is a relatively young Finnish e-invoicing operator, but during its little over two years in operation - it has grown to become the third largest e-invoicing provider in Finland. They are ambitious and something that speaks of this is their slogan: "the world deserves a free electronic invoicing infrastructure". In essence, they want to do to e-invoicing what Skype did to the telco industry. In a recent tweet (they're actually the third largest behind Nordea and Itella), they announced that they have surpassed Basware in the amount of clients. Basware is a publicly listed company. At the time of writing this, Basware is now the fourth largest e-invoicing provider with 3809 clients, Maventa has 3913 clients, while Itella has 5413 clients and Nordea is the largest with 10178 clients.
TradeShift Looking To Further Digitalize Payments
There's a startup in Denmark that went by the name of Porta for a long time. Since then, they have changed their name to TradeShift. TradeShift is looking to disrupt and shatter the oligopolies of EDI between large corporations and banks so that the technologies could be used by anyone - small and medium sized companies included. The founders of the company include an experienced bunch. They are Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest. Not a founder, but onboard the project is also Morten Lund who made himself famous by his personal bankruptcy some two years ago.
