The corporate conglomerate encompassing Certify, Chrome River and four other expense management specialists is being united under a single brand, dubbed Emburse, and former SAP Concur executive Eric Friedrichsen has taken the helm as CEO of the newly unified entity.
A 30-year veteran of the corporate software industry, Friedrichsen joins Emburse from Marketo, a division of Adobe, where he served as global head of commercial, SMB and growth markets. Before Marketo, he was senior vice president and general manager for SAP's North American mid-market and ecosystems division. Previously, he spent eight years in leadership positions at SAP Concur.
Certify founder and president Bob Neveu, who served as group CEO since the Chrome River merger, will depart the company.
Certify and Chrome River merged in March 2019 in a $1 billion-plus deal that also included Certify subsidiaries Abacus, Captio, Nexonia and Tallie. The company has positioned each brand as a specifically tailored solution for corporate clients of various types and sizes, from start-ups to global enterprises. In line with that strategy, the branding of the respective platforms will remain in place, with each serving as a business unit of Emburse, according to Friedrichsen.
"Our platforms are very much focused on a tailored experience for particular segments, geographies and industries, so maintaining that is very important," Friedrichsen said. Each brand will add "by Emburse" to the end of each name—for instance, "Certify by Emburse." Each brand will continue to be led by its respective general manager, he added.
While the standalone brands will remain in place, uniting them in a single leadership structure under the Emburse banner brings operational and deployment advantages for the combined company, which employs a total of 750 people worldwide, serving more than 4.5 million users at 14,000 corporate customers in 120 countries.
"We've got the scale to innovate at a much quicker pace [and] start sharing tech across all of our platforms to reach more customers more quickly," Friedrichsen said. Among the technologies on which Emburse is most focused are real-time expense reporting and reimbursement tools, data capture and extraction tools and deeper integration with corporate payment cards, according to the new CEO.
Payment card integration may a particular area of emphasis for the company, according to several indications—including the selection of the Emburse brand as the new corporate moniker. Emburse was a provider of virtual and physical payment cards for business expenses and vendor payments that was acquired by Certify/Chrome River in July 2019. Initially, the company integrated Emburse's solution into the Abacus brand to enhance real-time reporting, but there may be bigger plans on the horizon for the company's payments piece, Friedrichsen indicated.
"The decision to purchase Emburse was a very strategic choice," Friedrichsen said, adding that Emburse plans to expand payment offerings to more customers and platforms within its corporate umbrella in the near future.