Supplying physical locations in the age of digital financial services

While the number of FDIC-insured bank branches in the United States has fallen in the past decade from 82,126 to 69,996 in 2023, physical locations are still important to financial services organizations for many reasons, such as maintaining trust and credibility with their customers. Ensuring each location is adequately stocked with essentials—from office supplies to IT peripherals—can be a logistical headache for procurement teams and a distributed workforce. This is where smart business buying can help.

Financial services organizations with distributed locations should move toward a centralized procurement model to help both procurement and employees be more efficient at purchasing essential supplies for their branches. This allows the latter to focus more on customers and higher-value tasks and transactions.

Simplify purchasing, reduce tail spend

A centralized procurement approach allows companies to streamline the buying process for their employees, reduce redundancies, and improve cost control through standardized policies and procedures. However, many financial services organizations struggle to implement a centralized procurement strategy because the transition can be challenging, especially for those who are used to long-established practices and siloed operations. 

Centralized procurement offers many benefits, such as reining in tail spend, which refers to the 80% of purchases made by an organization that account for 20% of total spend. These purchases are often ad hoc, unplanned, and frequently undertaken outside of approved purchasing channels. This can open the door to significant compliance problems, such as contract leakage or rogue spend.

Reconciling tail spend can take up much of procurement’s time, especially with buyers spread across distributed locations and branches across the country. Compliance problems are therefore addressed retroactively, or not at all.

Analyzing procurement spend

To manage tail spend efficiently, procurement leaders need to gain visibility into all spend and suppliers in real-time with ease, efficiency, and control. They need tools and insights to source quickly on behalf of their organization.

Spend Visibility is a key procurement benefit for Amazon Business customers with a Business Prime membership. It allows procurement leaders in financial services to gain purchasing insights across multiple locations, fine-tune policies, and manage future spend. Procurement teams can easily see what employees are buying and customize reports to meet business needs, such as reporting on spend with local or diverse suppliers to track progress towards their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.

Providing a digital storefront with a wide selection

The ability to access a digital storefront to compare alternatives, see real-time price and inventory, and review the buyer quality rating can reduce office supply hiccups. The buying process with Amazon Business is simple—a stark contrast to the traditional supply chain process, the time it takes to negotiate an RFP, and being locked in to one or two suppliers. A digital storefront can make it easier and faster to screen multiple, trusted suppliers simultaneously.

With a wide selection and competitive pricing and certified sellers in one place, employees can make purchases quickly while helping their organization increase savings on larger quantities of select items, all without vendor contracts.

With Business Prime, buyers can receive free shipping on eligible items. By consolidating select items and receiving orders on a predictable schedule, or shipping orders to multiple locations with personalized delivery options, you greatly increase your receiving team’s efficiency.

Centralizing control, decentralizing the buying experience

Centralized procurement doesn’t mean buying across all distributed locations is centralized with one person. Instead, with Amazon Business, employees are empowered to buy what they need, when they need it, guided by predefined controls, such as preferred products and category restrictions, implemented by account administrators. This saves time for all, taking the mystery out of shopping for work by answering the question, "What am I allowed to buy?”

With Guided Buying, another key benefit of a Business Prime membership, procurement leaders can also add customized messaging to communicate why products are preferred or restricted, such as exceeding a spending threshold.

Reshaping procurement in financial services

Amazon Business for financial services aims to help leaders reshape their distributed locations procurement efforts with cost and time savings, greater productivity, and insightful purchasing analytics. With smart business buying, financial services organizations can improve the way they source supplies and make their supply chains more efficient.