Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade, had this to say:
Early 2019 saw the launch of Aimie, Sidetrade’s Artificial Intelligence platform, and the star of our Financials AI business. Aimie has been a resounding success. What’s more, with a spectacular 88% leap in new booked Annual Recurring Revenue, 2019 was a record year, with the signature of €5m worth of new annual subscription contracts. Beyond these figures, Aimie is the perfect tool for the increase in financial shared service centers in large companies. The challenge is daunting: collect payment from a massive volume of invoices and customers. The solution: drastically accelerate order-to-cash by using Aimie’s powerful algorithms to adapt follow-up action to individual customer payment behavior. Aimie is the proven way to boost the productivity, professionalism and performance of operational teams. This is a high-growth global market, and Sidetrade is confident in its ability to conquer it.”
| SIDETRADE (MILLION EUROS) |
2019 | 2018 | VARIATION (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 REVENUE | 6.0 | 5.3 | + 14% |
| Q2 REVENUE | 6.6 | 5.6 | + 16% |
| Q3 REVENUE | 6.4 | 5.5 | + 17% |
| Q4 REVENUE | 6.7 | 5.7 | + 18% |
| LIKE-FOR-LIKE ANNUAL REVENUE | 25.7 | 22.1 | + 17% |
| B2C SERVICES | – | 2.0 | – |
| ANNUAL REVENUE | 25.7 | 24.1 | + 7% |
2019 was Sidetrade’s fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth. Sidetrade’s annual revenue totaled €25.7m, representing remarkable organic growth of 17%, vs. 2018, like for like. Let us recall that Sidetrade revenue no longer includes B2C Services, since this business line was phased out, as announced in 2018.
This phenomenal sales growth was buoyed by the core Financials AI business, which reached €21.3m in 2019, up 17%. This acceleration reflects the attractiveness of the latest release of the Financials AI platform. Sales & Marketing AI activity is also growing steadily, up 17% in 2019.
In 2019, the booked Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from new customers shot up 88%, hitting a record level of €4.8m in new annual subscriptions, vs. €2.6m in 2018. This gives good visibility of Sidetrade’s revenue growth in 2020 and beyond. In fact, mean initial contract period for these new customers is 41.1 months.
Key account ARR performance was even more spectacular, reaching a record of €4.2m in annual subscriptions, vs. €2m in 2018, up 113%. This record stemmed largely from the core Financials AI business, with a whopping 295% rise to €3.8m in new ARR, vs. €1m in 2018. Many prestigious new customers signed up with Sidetrade in 2019, boosting strength in its main sales territories:
Three factors explain this outstanding growth: 1) The capacity of Aimie, Sidetrade’s AI platform, to augment dramatically operational performance; 2) Market dynamics demanding new ways of boosting productivity; and 3) Sidetrade’s high sales efficiency.
Today, more and more businesses are turning to Artificial Intelligence, because of its capacity to handle huge amounts of customer data so effectively, resulting in lower processing costs and better customer relations. For Finance, cutting-edge machine learning can process massive volumes of invoices, and customize the order-to-cash process based on AI analysis of customer payment behavior.
Since 2017, Aimie has been learning from Sidetrade’s exclusive cloud containing over 300 million payment experiences (transactions worth €953bn), and continuously improving. Aimie’s cash collection recommendations have proven 53% more effective than human decisions alone. In addition, Aimie has cut wasted actions (those not resulting in payment) by 51%, freeing up operational staff for value-added tasks.
Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, explains that robotic process automation spread in 2019, as companies sought to improve operational efficiency and integrate digital systems in new processes (source: 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation Software). Artificial Intelligence perfectly meets these needs, especially in shared service centers, which are a real mega-trend in large enterprises.
2019 was a great year for sales, especially in France, the UK and the US, proving the value of the investments made to increase the sales capacity.
The global software market for Sidetrade’s Financials AI is expected to exceed $3bn, according to a survey by Research and Markets. As Finance increasingly moves towards digitalization, Sidetrade is well-positioned to conquer this new market, thanks to a technological lead and a highly effective sales force.
Sidetrade is confident in their ability to sustain double-digit growth in 2020.
