Paris, May 18, 2021 – Spend management company Spendesk announced today that James Colgan is joining the executive leadership team as Chief Product Officer, bringing over 20 years of experience to the role. Most recently, Colgan held product leadership positions at Slack and Microsoft where he built teams and drove enterprise adoption of productivity tools and Outlook mobile respectively. At Spendesk, Colgan will be responsible for scaling Spendesk’s product development as the French fintech scaleup continues its international expansion and builds out the capabilities of its all-in-one spend management platform.
“As an employee over the years, I have used a number of different spend management systems, and have been constantly disappointed or frustrated. Difficult to use and far from enjoyable, these tools add no value to the employee and distract me from what I love to do – which is my job, and working with my team. I feel the pain and I want to solve that for myself and others. Spendesk is truly solving a problem, and has built a product people love to use,” Colgans says.
Colgan will join the executive leadership team with CEO & Co-Founder Rodolphe Ardant and Joseph Smith, who joined Spendesk as Chief Revenue Officer in October 2020. “Besides his tremendous experience, James also brings a strong international mindset and a deep sense of customer-centricity to the role, which will be invaluable for us at this stage of scaling our business,” says Ardant.
Spendesk offers an all-in-one spend management solution that delivers more visibility and automation to today's finance teams. The platform combines spend approvals, virtual and physical cards for employees, expense reimbursements and invoice management into one source of truth. With the launch of Spendesk Budgets, teams and budget keepers are further empowered to make timely and informed spending decisions with a real-time overview of what’s actually been spent.
“Budgets are at the heart of every company’s financial plan. They’re the foundational framework that aligns all departments on the same growth track. Yet, managing budgets is painful and cumbersome for everyone involved,” explains Ardant. With Spendesk Budgets, employees and their managers are able to self-monitor and make smarter investment choices with up-to-date balances against the approved spend. Also, finance have peace of mind, knowing that there will be no over-budget surprises with everything tracked and linked to their working plan. In addition to the new budget feature, Spendesk adds purchase orders to its invoice management module, enabling finance teams to streamline the whole accounts payable process end-to-end, from procure to pay.
About Spendesk
Spendesk’s all-in-one spend management solution streamlines the tedious admin associated with spending and managing money at work – to liberate businesses and their people to do their best work. Founded in 2016 by Rodolphe Ardant, Guilhem Bellion and Jordane Giuly within French startup studio eFounders, Spendesk now serves over 2,500 businesses such as Algolia, Soundcloud, Curve, Doctolib, Gousto, Raisin, Sezane, Wefox. Headquartered in Paris, Spendesk has offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Spendesk-backed CFO Connect is the fastest-growing global community of finance leaders with more than 6,000 members.
