Full Transcript for Andrew Butt Discusses Enable's Global Growth and Rebate Management

Chris Titley: 00:00 Hello, it’s Chris Titley here on this week’s episode of FinTech Fun. We’re joined by Andrew Butt, co-founder and CEO of Enable. Andrew, thank you so much for being part of the series. Andrew Butt: 00:08 Great to be here, Chris, thanks for having me. Chris Titley: 00:11 Andrew, something unique — we normally focus on Australian-based FinTechs, but Enable is not an Australian-based FinTech. I’d love to get a little bit of an understanding of what Enable is and a little bit about the history of the business. Andrew Butt: 00:21 Absolutely, yes. We’re certainly growing fast in Australia. I’ve enjoyed spending a lot of time there. We have offices in Sydney and Melbourne and customers all over the place. We can talk about that more, but Enable is a B2B SaaS platform that helps companies of all types in the supply chain, particularly to manage incentive agreements and what we call rebates. We work with a lot of retailers, as well as distributors and manufacturers, to manage all kinds of incentive and rebate agreements. Chris Titley: 00:50 And Andrew, how did the business begin? What was the spark around the idea? Take us back to the early days of day one with Enable. Andrew Butt: 00:58 Yeah, sure, absolutely. I met my co-founder when we were both learning to fly, which was my other passion in life. He was already running a very successful distribution company in the UK — that’s where my roots are. This was a central distribution company that was growing very, very fast. It had more and more complicated programs and arrangements with its suppliers, but there was no modern software to track that. So, that was the initial inspiration. My background is in coding, and fortunately, we now have much better engineers than myself, but I started by building a system for that distribution company called DCS. We had a huge amount of inbound interest from its immediate trading partners and elsewhere, which led to us building Enable as a dedicated software company. Chris Titley: 01:49 And Andrew, can you talk about the rebates and incentives and the whole market where you play? Is this a new market that you’ve built? And could you share some high-level metrics on how it works globally for SMEs and large businesses? Andrew Butt: 02:07 Sure. Andrew Butt: 02:07 Absolutely. Rebate management is a new category, a new software category. When we were starting this a few years ago, a lot of analysts and people thought it was a small market, and some questioned if many companies really used rebates. But we’ve since demonstrated that it’s a huge space. Every retailer and distributor in almost every industry uses these types of incentives to drive revenue and margin because it’s essentially pay-for-performance. Companies buying and selling goods buy at cost and sell with a markup to make a gross margin. Rebates are an overlay on top of that, driving behaviour to hit certain targets like value, volume, product mix, or market share. To give you some stats: 80% of global trade goes through the supply chain, valued at around $80 trillion USD globally. Rebates and incentives are attached to the vast majority of that. While I can’t give you an exact percentage, well over 50% of that trade involves rebates, and these rebates typically account for about 5% of the value. So, you’re talking trillions of dollars a year in rebate funds. Chris Titley: 03:34 And when companies use your platform, they likely see tangible numbers — whether that’s saving money or increasing revenue. Can you share what kind of feedback you get from clients? Andrew Butt: 03:55 Yeah, absolutely. It’s all of the above, depending on the use case. For a retailer or distributor, rebates typically represent 100% of their margin. We often find millions of dollars that aren’t being received because they aren’t tracked accurately. That results in a significant ROI, maybe 400% in the first year, which is a common figure if the company is recovering missed rebates. On the other side, for companies paying incentives, it’s about optimising margin and revenue for every dollar spent. They’re already paying these incentives, but often the effectiveness isn’t great. So, we boost revenue by improving effectiveness, which is one reason we’ve grown so fast — we can demonstrate such tangible ROI. Chris Titley: 05:10 In terms of platform features, are you getting good feedback from customers regarding development and innovation? Are there any pain points that you’re working on improving? Andrew Butt: 05:11 Yes, absolutely. We get a lot of feedback, and we have a customer advisory board and multiple forums where we engage with users. We also have a community of about two and a half thousand rebate experts, many of whom use our system. Some of the feedback leads to incremental improvements, while others are game-changing innovations. We started with finance teams that needed to calculate, forecast, and accrue for these types of funds. Since then, we’ve expanded into commercial teams, where sellers and buyers use the platform to optimise their agreements. We’re also incorporating AI to provide recommendations, showing users how they could buy or sell differently to get better returns, and how they could create better agreements going forward. Chris Titley: 06:04 And from inception to where you are now, you’ve raised capital. Can you tell us about the importance of that, your investors, and what you plan to do with the capital? Andrew Butt: 06:14 Sure, totally. We bootstrapped the business to about 20 customers initially because we wanted to get the product right and ensure our first customers were live, getting value, and giving good feedback. At that point, we raised our first capital — a Series A led by Menlo Ventures. Since then, we’ve raised a Series B, C, and D. Norwest Venture Partners led the Series B, Insight Partners from New York led the Series C, and Lightspeed Venture Partners in Silicon Valley led the Series D. The funds have