Hargreaves Lansdown

Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK’s largest retail investor platform, known for its commitment to digital innovation. Founded in 1981, the business has grown to serve over 1.9 million clients and manages assets worth over £155 billion. Hargreaves Lansdown was using email and offline forms for intake with Coupa for third-party risk assessment, and contract lifecycle management and Workday for POs—but was facing some key challenges. The team had limited visibility of their suppliers and indirect spend, and their time was monopolised by administrative work. Phil Thomas joined the business as Group Head of Procurement in December 2022 with the aim of diagnosing these challenges and leading the digital transformation of Hargreaves Lansdown’s procurement.

“Instead of focusing on strategic initiatives and driving value, my team was stuck wrestling with an inefficient patchwork of systems, offline forms and email. It was a frustrating experience—not just for us, but for every requester and approver across the business.”

When Phil began the search for new technology, he identified three core problems to solve:

Poor user experience

Using offline forms and email for intake and approvals was unintuitive and required significant training and ‘hand holding’. For requesters this meant grappling with complex processes, meaning new spend requests often arrived late, incomplete, or were processed outside of the system. For approvers it was tough to find the necessary context to make quick and informed decisions, leading to slow cycle times and frustration.

Manual processes

Processes were heavily reliant on manual administration. Shortfalls in the intake process meant the procurement team had to pick up the slack and manually input requests and supplier information to be tracked in Coupa, spreadsheets, and Workday. Workflows lacked automation, requiring constant human intervention to progress. Resultantly, it was difficult to know where requests were and what next steps were necessary, which was slowing the business down and complicating governance processes when it came to signing contracts.

Fragmented supplier management

There were challenges in strengthening financial and risk controls, due to limited visibility of suppliers, manual approval processes, and large volumes of indirect spend. As a regulated financial services business, ensuring compliance and mitigating risk was critical, but approvals were fragmented across multiple systems, making it laborious to track who had approved what—and why. Renewals management relied on manual processes for tracking and management, which created space for unnecessary or unnegotiated spend to fall through the cracks.

With firm selection criteria in mind, Hargreaves Lansdown undertook a thorough evaluation of both the market and capabilities of their existing systems. They considered additional investment in their current tech-stack, by building functionality in Workday or Salesforce, and connecting existing systems together—but instead chose to invest in a modern, purpose-built, intake and orchestration platform to power their digital transformation—here’s why:

Consumer-grade user experience

• Omnea provides a consumer-grade experience across the procurement process.
• Requesters are guided through a conditional intake that only asks for necessary information, and the right approvers are automatically involved and notified. They have full visibility of their pending reviews and are presented with an overview of the request and tailored summary so they can make an informed decision at speed.
• Workflows are easy to create and optimised in Omnea’s no-code workflow builder, and don’t rely on specialised consultants or developers to maintain. The Procurement team built with support from the Digital team.

Intelligent automation

• Omnea creates a single source of truth for supplier information, contracts, and renewals.
• Suppliers onboard directly via Omnea’s Supplier Portal which collects all necessary information.
• Renewals are managed through an intuitive calendar that creates full visibility and informs the Hargreaves Lansdown team of what action needs to be taken, at the right time in the lifecycle.

Seamless supplier governance and spend control

• The Hargreaves Lansdown team has full context in a single system, which facilitates ‘Deal Panel’ review meetings when varied stakeholders discuss high-value requests and complex reviews. Once this step has been completed, an Omnea workflow block issues a ‘Certificate to Sign’ for the requester, so there is no confusion over when a deal is fully reviewed by the appropriate teams and the correct authorised signatory can sign.
• The full context of a relationship is recorded in a single system, so the procurement team and business owners are ready for effective negotiations.
• They have complete visibility and an accessible audit-trail of all approvals in one platform.

Hargreaves Lansdown’s adoption of Omnea marks a key milestone in its procurement transformation journey, moving away from fragmented, manual processes to an automated, user-friendly, and centralised system. By prioritising user experience, Hargreaves Lansdown has simplified procurement workflows to drive complete adoption across teams. Automation has drastically reduced administrative burdens, enabling faster approvals and more efficient decision-making.

Most importantly, spend and risk controls have been strengthened, with full visibility into approvals and financial activity through a clear audit trail—something that was previously hugely manual and time consuming across scattered systems. Now, the procurement process is tracked in one place, delivering clear governance, transparency, and efficiency.

“Omnea has streamlined our operations and tech stack, providing a scalable platform that meets our needs today and will continue to support us in the future. By replacing multiple fragmented systems, forms and emails with a single, centralised platform, we now have a single view of our data—and have transformed our processes to be significantly more efficient and transparent.”