Business Insider fuels rapid innovation with modern procurement

The challenge

Founded in 2007, Business Insider pioneered digital-native business news coverage, using engaging, need-to-know storytelling to inform a new generation of leaders. Business Insider reaches over 100 million readers each month and hundreds of millions of viewers who watch their videos for over a billion minutes each month.

Business Insider's mission is to deliver thought-provoking stories on business, technology, innovation, and beyond to the people who are transforming our world. Delivering on this mission involves implementing a lot of software as fast as possible. But with an inefficient procurement process, the company was wasting time and resources.

Business Insider’s procurement process relied on a distributed and varied set of processes to track requests, reviews, approvals, and progress. 

The siloed communication created confusion and frustration, especially when new digital tools were being purchased. This problem is familiar to many digital enterprises. Some tools have too many secondary costs, some can’t be implemented at all, and some may be redundant with tools the company already has in place.

The solution

With offices around the world, it’s vital that Business Insider has a solid handle on financial approvals and controls with the visibility to manage spending across all areas of its organization. And as a digital enterprise, an innovative, modern solution like Zip is a natural fit.  

Business Insider needed a single shared, intelligent ingestion point, so every request would be seen by everyone who needed to see it. Zip filled that need, while adapting easily to the system landscape—because it seamlessly integrates with most internal systems, including ERPs, CLMs, GRCs, and more.

Zip provided comprehensive visibility of the entire procurement process for all cross-functional teams including IT, Finance, Legal, and others—giving all requests one route into the company, and providing a reliable record of the status of each request at any given time.

Zip’s automated workflows ensure every request is routed to the appropriate stakeholders directly or through key system integrations. From there, they can easily comment, assign tasks and subtasks, and monitor team SLAs for approvals. And Business Insider’s team has all the flexibility they need to mold and refine those workflows over time. “We can see the if-then logic behind the scenes and easily change it as needed to handle different types of requests,” Dowley explains.

The result

Business Insider’s infosec and engineering teams have an eye on every request before it’s too late.

Our CTO can see where all requests are coming from in one place, and we can reach out to the right people to run a performance evaluation before contracts are signed,” says Dowley.

Business Insider knew they had a problem even before finding Zip. “We’d just come off a bad implementation of another system,” Dowley explains. “It added a lot of unneeded complexity for the end user. It took much longer without adding anything. It was just unintuitive and unhelpful.”

By contrast, Zip is built from the ground up with user ease in mind—from the intuitive user interface to DIY configuration. After all, if a tool is hard to use, no one will use it. And if no one uses it, it accomplishes nothing. “You can tell there's more of a modern bent to the software design at Zip,” says Dowley. “It's a lot more user-friendly than many other platforms out there.”

Business Insider operates in a landscape where time is of the essence—so their challenges were driven by the need to move quickly. But that need can only truly be served if your processes are set up to prevent your people from running in circles. 

“You need to be able to move fast through decision-making and Zip doesn't slow that part down,” says Dowley. “It just enables people to have the right conversations at the right time.”


Using Zip, Business Insider is able to bring legal, finance, IT, and engineering teams into a single, coordinated procurement process that protects the company from risk without compromising innovation and progress. Or as Dowley puts it, “Zip gives us the flexibility and power we need.”

500 requests completed through technology, legal and business review in less than 12 months