Scaling procurement at Europe’s second‑largest neobank comes with a simple mandate: reduce OpEx and improve control without slowing the business down. At bunq, Commercial Partnership Manager Richard Filer runs procurement from Finance as a one‑person team managing ~300 suppliers. Before Omnea, requests, reviews, and approvals lived across forms and spreadsheets—fine when you’re small, but tough when you need visibility, accountability, and speed at the same time.

What was bunq looking for?

During his market assessment, Richard weighed the complexity of building in existing systems, hiring, and adding new tooling. Three essentials stood out:

  1. One system of record for third‑party contracts and spend—a foundation to build on as the team grows.
  2. Governance baked in, not bolted on—so Legal, Risk, Security, and Finance are brought in at the right moment, with clear segregation of duties that can’t be bypassed.
  3. Forward visibility for FP&A—to avoid late budget surprises and drive continuous improvement.

Omnea met those needs best. The platform centralizes intake‑to‑signature workflows so employees, approvers, and Finance share a single view of progress and ownership. Built‑in guardrails keep steps in sequence, and Legal and Risk teams are automatically involved exactly when needed. bunq expects Omnea’s reporting to surface bottlenecks by category and team, and is aligning spend data with finance to sharpen forecasting.

“To scale as a regulated bank, we needed a single source of truth for suppliers—plus governance that’s built in, not bolted on. Omnea gives us both and automates the manual chases between teams, so we move faster while keeping the controls our regulators expect.” Richard Filer, Commercial Partnership Manager, bunq

What’s next?

bunq is live with Omnea, and early internal feedback has been positive. Over the next 12 months, we’re jointly focused on two outcomes:

  • Process automation: using AI‑assisted contract review to cut cycle time (for example, pre‑flagging unacceptable clauses to suppliers) and workflow analytics to reduce time‑to‑signature—targeting meaningful improvements on today’s baselines.
  • Cost optimization: adopting SaaS usage visibility to weed out duplicate tools and right‑size licenses, and strengthening material/critical supplier reporting for regulators.

With Omnea in place, Richard is transforming procurement at bunq: clearer, faster paths to the right decision, tighter control where it matters, and a measurable contribution to OpEx reduction goals.

About Omnea

Omnea is an AI-native platform that streamlines procurement across teams and systems. It improves the buying experience, centralizes supplier management, and builds commercial and risk governance into every step. Founded in 2022, Omnea is trusted by global enterprises including Spotify, Adecco Group, and MongoDB.

About bunq

Founded in 2012 by serial entrepreneur Ali Niknam, bunq has brought lasting change to the European banking industry. By having its users at the heart of the business and building a product rooted in their wants and needs, bunq quickly scaled to become the second largest neobank in the EU. Serving those with an international lifestyle across the European Economic Area, bunq makes life easy for location-independent people and businesses starting from the way they manage money: how they spend, save, budget and invest.

Pioneering many things considered impossible, bunq was the first bank to get a European banking permit in over 35 years, raised the largest series A round ever secured by a European fintech (€193 million), and was the first EU neobank to achieve structural profitability at the end of 2022. On its mission to build the first global neobank for digital nomads, in April 2025, bunq announced it’s fast-tracking its entry in the US by applying for a broker-dealer license and planning to reapply for the full banking license later the same year.