Co-founder and CMO, Yokoy
Yokoy goes to Germany! Starting this month, our Country Manager Germany Ben Bauer and his team are offering medium and large companies in Germany the opportunity to bring their spend management up to date with the latest technology.
From Switzerland via Vienna to Munich
Today is the day! We are finally allowed to reveal on what the entire Yokoy team has been working on for months: Yokoy expands to Germany and opens its first office in Munich.
With his SaaS history and experience as a sales trainer, we found the perfect fit in Ben Bauer who will lead the Germany team as the country manager. He has set big goals for himself and has already started to build a great team around him. According to Ben: “A team that will not settle for second place: Yokoy Germany is ready to conquer the German market with modern sales and communication techniques.”
On top of that we were able to close the first major German clients before the official launch, after we had made our spend management solution Germany-ready. Now it’s time to further expand the Germany team and add logos of exciting German customers to Yokoy’s wall-of-fame.
After expanding to Vienna last November, we are very happy to be able to serve the entire DACH region “locally” from the Munich office. Yokoy continues to grow and this much we can already reveal: You can be excited about the next milestones, which are already in sight. That’s why it’s worth taking a brief look back to review the last few months.
From expense tool to all-in-one spend management solution
We started in 2019 in Switzerland with the ambition to revolutionize companies’ expense and credit card processes through automation. Today, the complete process of the Yokoy solution, from the photo of the receipt to the financial posting – including checks, VAT reclaim, archiving and reimbursement of expenses – takes a maximum of five seconds. As a result, managers and the finance team at each company only need to focus on exceptions and outliers.
A few days ago, we were pleased to announce a significant expansion of our software offering: The initial expense tool has become a comprehensive spend management solution that allows for the handling of vendor invoices in addition to expenses. Artificial intelligence is once again at the heart of this further development.
"We believe AI needs to get out of academic theory and be used in real life - preferably where it significantly facilitates the everyday lives of people and companies."
As with the expense tool, humans are still at the center of our new comprehensive spend management offering, but they no longer have to worry about routine tasks, which artificial intelligence now relieves them of, but can focus entirely on exceptional cases. If the software detects deviations from the specifications, for example, it involves the responsible instances. The process of approvals can be adapted to company-specific features within the software.
Corona as a digitalization booster
By expanding our software offering, we responded to an important need among our customers. On the one hand, the Corona crisis clearly demonstrated to many companies the need for automation in the financial area; on the other hand, it also made them aware of the great opportunities offered by digitization.
As a result, interest in digital topics, especially in artificial intelligence solutions, has also increased rapidly in Austria and Germany over the past 15 months. According to a study by the digital association Bitkom, 95 percent of companies in Germany have become more interested in digitization in the wake of the Corona crisis. We want to meet this growing demand with our commitment to the German market.
And what's next?
We have set ourselves big goals. In the fall, we will add physical and virtual corporate cards to the software across Europe. You can already sign up for the waiting list. At the same time we want to increase the user numbers from currently just over 45’000 to 100’000 by the end of the year.
