Expense management provider Nexonia acquired competitor ExpenseWatch,
Nexonia CEO Neil Wainwright confirmed. He did not reveal the acquisition price
but said the company will not lay off employees. Nexonia now has a total of
1,200 corporate customers.
Wainwright said ExpenseWatch customers will experience no
changes for at least two years. He expects it to be a "good fit" with
Nexonia, as they both focus on customer service and target small and midmarket
companies. Nexonia additionally has some larger enterprise customers, according
to Wainwright.
"The combination of both firms gives us the ability to
accelerate our product development and build more features, some of [which] apply
very strongly to the enterprise space," Wainwright said.
ExpenseWatch, Wainwright noted, offers robust purchase order
and accounts payable functionalities, areas Nexonia wants to expand. "They've
added and built out different features … that now we can incorporate into
Nexonia."
And he is not ruling out future acquisitions. "ExpenseWatch
is an amazing company. … If other opportunities like that come up, then
absolutely. We're always going to do them when they make sense, not just
because we get to grow."
Nexonia's Evolution
Nexonia launched in Canada in 2004 as an expense and time sheet
software provider targeting consulting firms. "What's happened over the
last 12 years is we evolved into a robust spend-management platform,"
Wainwright said. This transformation has been driven by customer requests integrate
with travel and enterprise resource planning systems. "Our customers say
to us, 'You're awesome at doing approval routing for expenses; it all works so
seamlessly and on mobile. Can you make that available on our other nontravel
spend and purchase orders and accounts payable?'" he explained.
Nexonia, whose customer base is headquartered primarily in
the United States, has what Wainwright called "deep integrations" with
nine companies, including SAP, Salesforce, NetSuite, Intuit Quickbooks, Intaact
and ERP provider Abila, its most recent addition. Uber integration will launch in
the next few months, and another travel partnership also is near completion. The
integrations go beyond importing and exporting data or providing a plug-in.
Rather, they involve machine-to-machine or software-to-software synthesis,
according to Wainwright. Companies also can customize them. Netsuite and
Intaact, for example, offer 300 settings.
"We're winning between 75 percent to 80
percent of business opportunities, and a lot of it is because of these deep
integrations," he said. "We also have a low turnover—historically at
about 1 percent and it's trending to half of 1 percent."