Pauline Babel, Spendesk's CFO on P2P Automation

With an extensive career in both financial strategy and procurement, Pauline Babel is the current CFO at Spendesk.

A significant part of her role is to champion the voice of Spendesk customers within the company, ensuring the product roadmap reflects the real pressures CFOs face in the field, not just theoretical ones.

"Procurement has been one of the most decisive strategic levers in our journey to profitability," says Pauline.

"I'm proud to say Spendesk is now the first spend management platform in Europe to reach profitability - a milestone we hit ahead of schedule. We achieved that milestone by combining rigorous methodology, the right tooling and genuine engagement from all stakeholders and budget owners across the company."

How has P2P shifted from back-office to a strategic lever?

Historically, procurement was the domain of large enterprises, companies with the scale to negotiate significant volume discounts and capture meaningful margins. For most mid-market businesses, it simply wasn't on the agenda.

What changed everything? Two things: the explosion of SaaS and subscription-based spending, and the pressure that high interest rates have put on back office.

On the spend side, every company today, regardless of size, carries a long tail of software subscriptions, usage-based contracts, and recurring vendor relationships. Managing those rigorously requires exactly the kind of granular, methodological approach that large industrials have applied to physical procurement for decades.

That methodology has now been democratised, thanks to tools that digitise the process and make data visible and actionable in real time.

On the profitability side, the equation has shifted fundamentally. With high interest rates, profitability is no longer optional; it's become a prerequisite for raising capital and for sustainable growth. That has moved procurement from a nice-to-have to a board-level priority.

What kept P2P stuck in the back-office for so long was fragmented data and a narrow mandate: procurement teams were looped in only to negotiate fees, and even then, they often missed the qualitative dimensions, actual usage, license count, contract duration, and alignment with real business needs. Without visibility into those factors, you're optimising on price alone while leaking value everywhere else.

Today, procurement is a true business partner. Sitting at the table alongside HR and FP&A, with budget owners engaged at every step.

That shift is what allowed us at Spendesk to turn procurement discipline into a direct driver of our path to profitability.

Can P2P become too automated? What about human supplier relationships?

Automation is a tool, not a destination. And the one thing automation genuinely cannot replace is the human side of supplier relationships.

AI will absolutely play a bigger role in P2P: aggregating data, surfacing insights, flagging anomalies, even predicting supply needs.

But business partnering and understanding the full context of a negotiation, reading a supplier's constraints, building the kind of trust that gets you a favourable renewal, that requires human judgment and human interaction. It's not yet something you can delegate to a model.

What the right process automation does is win back the time needed to do that well. Today, procurement teams spend an enormous amount of effort just aggregating savings,  piecing together what was achieved across contracts that are structured differently, buried in different sections, with no single source of truth. That fragmentation means savings go untracked, and more importantly, they go undefended when it matters most: in conversations with leadership.

When you remove that friction, through a centralised supplier dashboard, real-time contract visibility, automated renewal alerts, your procurement team can focus on what creates genuine value: negotiating intelligently, advising budget owners, and protecting the business relationships that matter.

So no, P2P can't be too automated if the automation is in service of better human decisions. The risk isn't too much automation; it's automation without the visibility layer that makes it meaningful.

What does P2P look like in 2030?

By 2030, the best P2P platforms will function as unified procure-to-pay operating systems, managing the full cycle from request to payment, with every stakeholder having exactly the information they need, at exactly the right moment.

Procurement will play a multi-dimensional role: optimising working capital and cash flow, improving gross margin through smarter vendor management, and, this one is underrated, increasing legal protection. As contract review becomes more automated and agentic AI takes on more of the workflow, companies will have far better oversight of their contractual obligations and risks, without the overhead.

Savings will be tracked in real time, with a live source of truth that every stakeholder can access and that leadership can hold to account. No more end-of-year debates about what was actually achieved.

But the fundamental equation won't change: visibility + control = profitability. The platforms that master that, the ones that make finance and procurement genuine strategic growth engines, not back-office cost centres, will be the ones that win in 2030. And honestly, that's what Spendesk is already building today.