Lean Technologies scales a procurement function without a dedicated team

The challenge

As a regulated FinTech licensed by the central banks of both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Lean Technologies has to know exactly who it conducts business with from a vendor standpoint. But for years, procurement had no single owner. IT handled software purchasing, and almost everything else ran through spreadsheets, Word docs, Slack, and email.

A request could go back and forth between business owners, Finance, Risk, Compliance, and IT for anywhere from one to six months, and nobody was sure who had the final say. Vendor KYB checks ran on spreadsheet questionnaires, taking four to six weeks at best and close to a year at worst. Contracts lived in separate Finance, Legal, and business-owner folders, so renewals often showed up after the fact.

People stopped asking for new tools, or skipped the process altogether. “The frustration was the biggest KPI,” says Nabil Dar, CFO at Lean Technologies.

The tipping point came in the 2024 budget cycle, when Nabil asked his team for every supplier, contract term and expiry date, and they had to go hunting through PDFs to answer. “How is this a scalable way for us to build a finance function of the future if we can't even confidently say we have a source of truth for contracts and pricing terms with our vendors?” Nabil adds.

The solution

The team’s first goal was cost savings, but it quickly grew into saving people time, building a source of truth, and meeting Lean's regulatory obligations. They looked at everything from vendor management tools to AP platforms, and Zip stood out for covering the whole process in one place. The legacy suites that came close were clunky and would have needed costly custom integrations. “Zip was possibly the only one that let me cover that process end to end,” Nabil shares.

Lean, one of the first FinTechs in the region on Zip, started with the core procure-to-pay modules and added nearly everything else within weeks. 

With Zip, Lean can:

• Run every purchase request through one workflow, from vendor KYB and approval to POs, bill reconciliation and payment
• Sync vendor records and POs to Wafeq, its accounting platform, in near real time
• Query Zip from Claude through the Zip MCP

Lean's Head of Strategic Finance administers Zip alongside Legal, Risk, Compliance, InfoSec and IT, and there is no dedicated procurement team. “Procurement for me should be a tech-first function,” says Nabil.

The result

The biggest change is speed. Vendor onboarding that once averaged two to three months now takes a couple of weeks, and a purchase request still open after three weeks is unusual. “The fact that we're now talking about days and weeks as opposed to months is a massive leap for us,” says Nabil.

Adoption has followed. Before Zip, purchase orders were an alien concept at Lean. Today, 90-95% of indirect spend flows through Zip, about 60% of spend by value is PO-backed, and Lean is aiming for 100% of applicable spend by mid-2027.

Renewals look different too. Alerts arrive 30, 60, or 90 days out, giving the team time to renegotiate or compare alternatives instead of finding out after the fact. “Before we were very reactive, and now we're in a very proactive state of mind as a finance and procurement team,” says Nabil.

In the future, Lean wants requests to take days, not weeks, and expects Zip's AI agents to help it get there. “The problems we've solved so far are great,” says Nabil. “But the most exciting thing is what is yet to come.”