Until early 2024, vendor management at Luno was largely decentralised. Relationship owners across the business engaged suppliers independently, and when people moved roles or left the business, context often moved with them.

Luno’s finance and legal teams did their best to connect the dots, but without a centralized view they were left working from fragments rather than a complete picture. That made it hard to spot duplicate spend before it was committed, or to consistently get ahead of renewals to enable right-sizing, negotiation, or cancellation.

At the same time, expectations around governance and third-party oversight were rising. Luno wanted to strengthen:

• Audit-ready records of third-party onboarding and due diligence
• Visibility of its most critical service providers
• Controls around how new spend and renewals were initiated

It was the right moment to move from a patchwork of local practices to a more structured, company-wide approach, and Jandré Bester (Legal Operations Manager) led the charge.

The Jira stopgap: a complex process on the wrong tool

To respond quickly, Jandré’s team built a basic onboarding process in Jira with a non-negotiable rule: no vendor could be paid unless they’d been through the process.

What started as a simple sense-check quickly grew into a robust procurement policy with:

• 40+ routing rules
• 10 different paths through the workflow, depending on vendor type and risk
• Up to 10 teams involved for high-risk vendors

But while, the intention and processes were robust; the platform wasn’t. Jira’s linear ticket model forced a complex vendor lifecycle into a rigid, one-way path.

• Fragile workflows. If one rule broke, so did everything downstream. That meant Jandré spent a lot of time debugging and maintaining the flow.
  
• Top-heavy intake. With no supplier portal, relationship managers had to collect detailed vendor information by email and re-key it at intake. Onboarding a vendor immediately carried a “this is going to be painful” reputation.
  
• Senior time wasted. In high-stakes deals, executives ended up in long back-and-forth email chains just to chase documents and answer process questions.
  
• Poor renewal data. Jira tracked from ticket creation, not contract start or renewal dates, making accurate renewal planning almost impossible.‍
• Manual audit work. Responding to audit-style requests and pulling together third-party records for regulatory requirements added to the team’s workload.

“We proved the value of having a process. But the Jira setup was fragile and held by one person. It wasn’t sustainable.”

Rather than force teams into a monolithic P2P, Luno wanted an orchestration layer that could sit across a best-of-breed tech-stack with Tiapalti and Juro. Key requirements were:

• Create a structured “front door” for all requests
  
• Embedded TPRM and due diligence collection, proportional to potential risk
  
• Minimal disruption for the ~10 functions involved in reviews
  
• Integrations into tools the business already used (Slack, Jira, Juro, Tipalti)

A consumer-grade intake that people actually like

With Omnea, Luno created a single intake built around consumer-grade UI. Now requesters are only asked for necessary information, based on vendor type and risk profile, and the right approvers are looped in accordingly.

Feedback changed almost overnight:

“I’ve had so many comments about how quick and painless Omnea is to use. We’ve gone from vendor onboarding being seen as red tape to it being a business process people are happy to follow.”

Omnea’s status tracking and ETA estimates also mean relationship owners can see exactly where a vendor is in the process and when approval is likely. The habitual “where is this?” and “when will it be done?” messages have disappeared.

Risk-adjusted workflows across the whole lifecycle

Together, Luno and Omnea mapped the real approval journeys and translated them into Omnea workflows:

• Risk-based onboarding. Low-risk marketing tools might involve four teams; a critical payments provider can trigger reviews from 10+ teams, including legal, InfoSec, treasury, engineering, FP&A, and AFC (anti-financial crime) screening.
  
• Remediation workflows. Dedicated flows to clean up historic vendors, capture missing data and bring the existing state into the new standards without paralysing the business.
  
• Review and sentiment surveys. Lightweight workflows to collect stakeholder feedback and vendor performance signals on an ongoing basis.

Integrations: meeting teams where they already work

Omnea now sits at the centre of Luno’s vendor ecosystem:

• Juro (contracts): Contracts are pushed automatically from Omnea into Juro, keeping legal records in sync with vendor records.
  
• Tipalti (payments): Approved vendor data is passed through, so payments are tied to a controlled onboarding process.
  
• Slack: Notifications and updates are delivered in Slack, helping approvers keep things moving without logging into another tool.
  
• Jira: Where teams still rely on Jira, Omnea can push populating tickets and sync the status back, instead of asking them to change how they work.

“We wanted as little disruption as possible. Omnea lets us meet teams where they already work and orchestrate the vendor process across their systems of choice.”

Supplier portal: removing friction and adding legitimacy

The Supplier Portal removed a major friction point by collecting information directly from vendors via a standardised onboarding link, rather than ad-hoc email chains. Questionnaires are tailored to service type and risk level, and suppliers input renewal dates and agreement durations themselves, improving accuracy compared to relying on relationship managers. The consistent, branded portal also gives legitimacy to Luno’s requests, reducing confusion and back-and-forth.

“Getting a list of requirements in an email doesn’t carry the same weight as ‘here’s the onboarding link to our vendor platform, these are the documents you need to provide to do business with us. The portal adds legitimacy, and the data is more accurate because it comes straight from the source.”

In the first two months, around 100 vendors had already passed through Omnea—spanning onboarding, renewals, remediation and offboarding—without complaints from business stakeholders or due diligence teams.

More importantly, the role of the function has shifted.

“Omnea has allowed us to move from just managing vendors to actually running a procurement function. Onboarding, due diligence and renewals are largely automated. Now we can focus on negotiations, benchmarking and saving the company real money.”

With the operational noise reduced, the team is now tracking and driving tangible results:

• Faster onboarding: Targeting low-risk vendors completed in a few days rather than ~30.
  
• Quicker screening: Reducing vendor screening from 4–5 days to 1–2 days through automation.
  
• Negotiated savings: Building a dataset of deal outcomes with an ambition to consistently secure minimum 10% savings.
  
• Reliable vendor data: 500+ vendors migrated, with remediation workflows aiming for 100% up-to-date records on active engagements.
  
• Better decisions: Clearer visibility over renewals, consolidation opportunities and truly critical suppliers.

From a fragmented, manual process held together by one person, Luno now has a scalable, audit-ready vendor and procurement function—with Omnea as the structured front door and orchestration layer.