Candex: Simplifying procurement

“The next evolution of procurement is going to revolve around user experience and simplicity.”

Jeremy Lappin, CEO and Co-Founder of Candex, has no doubt about what lies ahead for procurement. 

Given the plethora of tools procurement has at its disposal- in the form of new and old tools, different processes and new third-party risk management requirements- the business world can seem fragmented. 

Fortunately, Candex exists and has a mission to simplify the user experience.

Candex is a tail spend management leader that focuses on making payments to small or one-time vendors easier. Founded in 2011 by Lappin and Shani Vaza, the company’s technology removes thousands of vendor records from financial systems all while delivering control, speed, tax compliance and visibility.

“We take the noise out of managing and paying small, one-time vendors,” Lappin explains. “Companies are constantly finding new vendors that are more cost-effective, innovative, or better suited to specific needs. We make it easy to engage those suppliers quickly, without getting bogged down in lengthy onboarding processes. This enables procurement teams to focus their time and resources on high-value, strategic purchases that warrant deeper due diligence, while we simplify the management of smaller, one-off purchases. The result is less operational overhead, faster vendor engagement, and a more efficient procurement process overall.”

In 2026, companies operate within a complex environment with a significant number of suppliers needing to be onboarded. This is often cumbersome and time-consuming when it comes to smaller spend, which is where Candex comes into the equation. Candex sits at the intersection of buyers, suppliers, and payments, and eliminates the hassle involved – allowing procurement teams to focus on completing the necessary compliance on the higher-value, more strategic spend, and removing bottlenecks.

And over the past few years, Candex’s solution has grown considerably in popularity within the space – quickly becoming a go-to tool that eradicates the unnecessary noise from operations. Lappin explains that once that happens, procurement teams are left with a clear path to excel. “The more people experience Candex, the more they make it a part of their core strategy.”

Today, much of procurement’s operating model is antiquated and still relies on processes that were designed decades ago. With this in mind, Candex is heavily aligned with this year’s DPW theme of Recode – which is the idea of rethinking how procurement and supply chains operate – and Lappin believes there is an increasing amount of pressure on introducing AI correctly into their organisations. “That’s likely to be a major theme over the next few years,” says Lappin. “The challenge won’t be adopting AI, it will be using it in ways that create meaningful value while balancing other business priorities. While building internally has become faster and more accessible, speed alone isn’t an advantage. Organizations must be deliberate about what they build and how they implement it. Otherwise, the rapid pace of development can easily lead to inefficiencies and unintended consequences.”

Janina Insua, Global Head of Sales at Candex, adds that Candex Programs – another product that Candex offers- feels closely aligned with Recode. Candex is redesigning, or rewriting processes, to make it easier to manage transactions that sit outside traditional procurement while still maintaining control and compliance. “These transactions that sit outside of traditional procurement are exactly what we built Candex Programs for,” adds Insua. “There are a subset of transactions where one-to-one POs are often not practical because requiring unique requisitions for every transaction of that payment type would be a huge friction point for the business”.

“Some examples that come to mind are HCPs, candidate reimbursements, legal settlements, charity donations; these often require shorter payment days, a different set of contracts, unique reporting, and they often benefit from a different onboarding experience than the one we know of for traditional vendors”.

“Candex Programs supports all of the above while still allowing our customers to preserve their pre-existing workflows and approvals, and they get full visibility into what’s being purchased, by who, from who, from where, how many times, and for how much.”

Candex Programs is similar to re-coding how legacy procurement systems were designed, reimagining them for the types of transactions that never really fit in the first place, but now with the right checkpoints and guardrails to stay compliant. According to Insua, one of the main reasons that non-traditional spend has historically never fit into the legacy procurement process is a poor user experience. “Procurement technologies and processes fail to deliver value when they’re too complex and misaligned with how people actually work,” Insua tells us. “Trying to force rigid and unintuitive processes leads to disengagement, slower cycle times, and high third-party risk, which no one wants. If companies want to bring structure and control to this space, they have to do it with the user experience in mind. Procurement teams need to be intentional with removing unnecessary obstacles or friction points from the correct behaviours and processes that they’re wanting to breed across the business.”

If a customer does not use purchase orders as part of their procurement workflow, with Candex Programs they still have the ability to use their pre-existing workflows to manage vendors and spend. Candex only engages a payee once a payment request has been approved by the buyer. Candex then collects all required details, runs compliance scans on the payee, and issues payment to the payee once the payment is made by the customer to Candex. And there are several ways that Candex brings control and governance to these payments, Insua reveals. “First, vendors are required to accept contractual terms and conditions upon acceptance of any order through the Candex platform,” she says. “This means there’s an engagement contract every time, which protects Candex and our customers. In addition, customers can set payment limits as to how much can be paid to any vendor through Candex, meaning the customer is setting the threshold for spend materiality.  Not only that, the customer decides what commodities are purchased through Candex as well. This means that if they want to exclude any high risk commodities, then they can. A number of customers also apply checkbox verifications or custom questionnaires for additional compliance.”

This list goes on. “Candex gives clients the flexibility to introduce additional approval layers when needed, helping them maintain the right level of governance over their spend. We also conduct daily vendor screening against leading sanctions and anti-money laundering (AML) databases, including watchlists and other regulatory sources. If a vendor is flagged, clients are notified immediately. To support transparency and compliance, Candex provides real-time visibility into every order, payment, and payee. Clients have access to comprehensive, audit-ready reporting and can manage reporting access by country, category, and other dimensions relevant to their business. Why is this important? Because in this world of AI evolution, having quality data will be key to successfully ‘recoding’, orchestrating, and automating existing processes to better cater to the user experience.” 

Find out more about Candex here.