How Encompass uncovered $140,000 in cloud savings with Vertice

Encompass, the number one platform for automating corporate Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence, has been helping banks and financial institutions fight financial crime since 2012.

Following successful growth in Australia, Encompass broadened its reach globally by venturing into both the European and North American markets. The company scaled seamlessly with the cloud but its rapid growth resulted in fast-growing cloud spend. Even after putting significant resources towards improving the company’s architecture for both performance and cost, the team still knew there was room to optimize.

Ultimately, the engineering team felt it was dedicating too many hours to identifying optimization opportunities rather than implementing changes. At the same time, the finance team lacked insight into cloud spend and wanted the ability to better forecast future spend.

Encompass was already leveraging Vertice to optimize its SaaS purchasing so it was a natural extension to discuss how the Vertice Cloud Cost Optimization tool could drive similar cost savings. The engineering team wanted to prioritize a way to quickly surface optimization opportunities so that the team could focus their efforts on implementation and building new products instead. For them, the depth of information and ease-of-implementation of optimizations was the driving factor.

At the same time, the finance team wanted a partner that would provide them with a window into current and projected cloud costs. “We were concerned about the rapid growth of our cloud costs and it seemed impossible to get visibility and control of them. Vertice helped us get a holistic view of our cloud spend and made the process of reducing it incredibly simple to manage, ” said Ciara McKerrow, Head of Finance at Encompass.

The advantages of collaborating with Vertice became apparent during the complimentary spend audit, during which Vertice swiftly identified nearly $500,000 in potential savings from automatic or low-effort changes. This saved the engineering team hours that would have otherwise been spent on identifying areas for enhancement before implementation.

At the same time, the visibility the platform offered gave the finance team a better understanding about the efforts that were underway to enhance cost efficiency. “Vertice Cloud Cost Optimization helps facilitate conversations between our finance and engineering teams about current costs and has given us more confidence around projections moving forward,” said McKerrow.

Following a review of the initial recommendations, Encompass achieved savings of $143,000 within the first three months, with plans to implement even further optimizations on an ongoing basis. This quick time to value in combination with the enhanced visibility and control for both the finance and engineering teams has led to even more confidence in the future of its partnership with Vertice.