Simplifying procurement while saving hard costs for intelliflo

The Challenge

A growing fintech company specializing in financial planning, intelliflo’s tech procurement processes and workflows were heavily shaped by its parent company's (Invesco) centralized global business operations team.

While intelliflo retained the ability to select vendors and handle contract negotiations independently, the broader procurement frameworks, approval processes, and cost leverage mechanisms were influenced by Invesco's centralized approach. 

This meant intelliflo had limited autonomy to build its own process foundations, drive independent cost reduction initiatives, or negotiate standalone agreements outside of Invesco's vendor partnerships and discount structures.

But being acquired presented a chance for change. In August 2025, global investment firm Carlyle Group bought intelliflo from Invesco.

On the one hand, this was a huge opportunity to rationalise the tech stack and take control of its spend. But on the other hand, intelliflo also suddenly appreciated the scale of the task. 

Tech purchasing decisions that had made sense for the entire group were now unsuitable for intelliflo on its own, meaning tools needed to be replaced and migrated quickly. Plus, they owned none of the context, comms and sometimes even contract information from the original purchase.  

“We couldn’t strategically plan our renewals and negotiations and our data wasn’t accurate. It was a huge concern for me.”
Kelly-Marie Loftus, Head of Operations  

But with no pre-existing processes, renewing and onboarding vendors proved painful. Teams worked in siloes, bottlenecks were common - and crucial procurement and contract information ended up scattered across various communication chains.

As part of being acquired, intelliflo undertook a root-and-branch review of its entire tech stack and procurement processes, from request processes and approval workflows to vendor onboarding and performance management.

However this would require an enormous amount of time, resources and procurement knowledge - which intelliflo lacked.

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The Solution 

Carlyle Group recommended Vertice as a solution, and following a demo of Vertice’s technical and professional capabilities, it was clear Vertice was the ideal solution. 

Vertice and intelliflo immediately prioritised the underlying procurement processes, creating  intelligent, customized workflows that would simultaneously address the visibility, control, speed and compliance of intelliflo’s tech purchasing. 

“As soon as a contract has reached the point of needing financial approval, it’s flagged to the CFO, with all the context they need to make a decision: Is this within budget? Can you approve?” Meanwhile, in parallel, it’s passed to IT and security, along with the context relevant to them. Then final sign off from our CEO. It’s so quick, and fully visible - including if there are bottlenecks.”
Kelly-Marie Loftus, Head of Operations

Vertice AI was also layered throughout the procurement platform, giving intelliflo’s team immediate access to contract data, terms and statuses, real-time pricing benchmarks, data-backed negotiation levers, workflow efficiency recommendations, and even insights on how to optimize their tech stack based on usage data, risk profiles or even how comparable businesses typically structured their environments. 

Vertice also simultaneously moved quickly to upload all of intelliflo’s SaaS contracts to the centralized platform, creating a clean picture of the size, costs, gaps and liabilities within the tech stack - and identifying the imminent renewals that needed to be either cancelled or renewed at better rates or on better terms. 

intelliflo could then rely on Vertice’s procurement experts and real-time pricing benchmarks and intelligence across 32,000+ vendors, to take on these renewals and new purchases, and deliver the best possible outcomes. 

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The Results 

After a speedy onboarding, ROI flowed thick and fast.

intelliflo’s senior leadership team had almost immediate visibility of the extent and risk within its entire tech stack, giving them the opportunity to swap out unsuitable tools and onboard new capabilities - setting the business up for its new direction.

The team had full control of the surrounding procurement processes - including insights into where it could be made more efficient.

Vertice also gave intelliflo’s procurement team deep data insights into overall process performance, ranging from efficiency to budgetary and cost savings. These insights have been routinely used for continuous improvement, and even board reporting. 

Vertice’s expert buyers, equipped with real-time benchmarking data and vendor intelligence,  delivered average savings of 30% per contract in just 6 months, including a 33% reduction on intelliflo’s central Salesforce contract. Altogether, the savings totalled $1m annually. 

Overall, intelliflo saved over 150+ hours of manual processing time across dozens of requests, and achieved a 4.4x ROI and surpassed its savings guarantee in only 3 months. Crucially, the Vertice team ensured that while SaaS spend was scaled down, this reduction was balanced with intelliflo’s AWS spend commitment agreement.

And the partnership isn’t standing still - intelliflo is now looking to utilize Vertice’s ability to integrate with other tools, such as NetSuite, in order to maximise efficiency opportunities. 

Based on the results, stakeholders at Carlyle are now recommending Vertice out to other companies in its portfolio - using this success story at intelliflo to highlight the potential impact. 

“I’ve learned so much from the team at Vertice and the platform. The full package - the team’s knowledge and expertise, all the benchmarking, the workflows - it’s been pretty amazing.”
Kelly-Marie Loftus, Head of Operations