Corcentric is one of those companies that, to borrow one of Churchill’s famous lines, can feel like a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. Founded in 1996 (one year after FreeMarkets), it was the first leveraged buying organization to adopt early payment at scale — as a carrot to get hesitant suppliers on-board. And it worked.
Since then, Corcentric has expanded dramatically into both source-to-pay (S2P) and order-to-cash (O2C) — and has gone even deeper on payments, working capital and trade financing.
Corcentric fueled its aggressive expansion by investing in its fleet and truck parts buying (and payment/collections) business and conducting a series of acquisitions, starting in 2002 when it bought its original outsourced technology partner, Corcentric (at the time Corcentric was branded AmeriQuest). It ceased its acquisitions for a number of years before resuming in earnest with InfoAccess, COR360, Source One, Netsend, Determine and Vendorin.
Having felt disconnected from Corcentric’s recent journey, I decided to drop by its customer conference in Orlando last week to better understand where the firm is today, especially from a technology perspective with S2P, AP and AR alongside its adjacent GPO, cash collections and payments business lines.
After 2022’s pulled SPAC effort confused a number of people given the breadth of the business, I thought it would be helpful to share some of my findings and analysis here and explain how I look at the different pieces that make up Corcentric as a SaaS provider today. And potentially more interesting: how it is coming together into a more cohesive whole as a tech-enabled managed services firm.
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