Dynamic Discounting

Purchase to Pay, P2P and Dynamic DiscountingIt takes several iterations of a good idea and a bit of sex appeal before it catches on. The iPhone wasn’t the first multifunctional device – it was just the first on the market to package everything up into an object of desire. I clearly recall explaining to a friend: “The camera is inferior, it doesn’t have Flash and the battery life is useless. But just look at it. I don’t care if it doesn’t work – I want one!” There’s a kind of mysterious synergy – the sum of the parts don’t add up to much but somehow, the whole is huge. It’s the same with some business and technology innovations. And in the invoicing space, it’s beginning to have a remarkable effect.

Purchase to Pay, P2P and Dynamic DiscountingWhen Alexander Graham Bell, said "Watson, come here! I want to see you", little did he suspect that in the 21st century, less than 150 years after he began his experiments, the telephone would be so ubiquitous that even in parts of Africa where there is no running water, there would be full cell phone coverage. And at that time, in about 1873, the "CFO" was a man in a tall hat with a quill in his hand in charge of a team of accounts clerks laboriously scratching numbers into leather bound ledgers.

In a thought provoking and incisive article by Tracy Bramlet, she describes in some detail the adverse effects on the financial supply chain following the disastrous explosion that sunk the Deepwater Horizon rig, killed 11 workers that initiated the current spill that is pumping 200,000 gallons of...