XP Inc

XP Inc, one of the largest financial institutions in Brazil and recently listed among the Top 5 most valuable companies in the country, shared at the 2024 Procurement Forum how Linkana revolutionized its supplier due diligence and management process.

The talk, delivered by Letícia Bastos, Procurement Coordinator at XP Investimentos, showed the challenges faced, the results achieved and the next steps of this successful partnership.

The challenge: a manual and costly process

Before Linkana, XP dealt with:

• 5,000-supplier base and around 80 new records per month;
• Highly manual due diligence process, with lookups in multiple bureaus and saving reports in internal folders;
• Lack of standardization and traceability of information;
• High time consumption: 30 to 45 minutes per due diligence on average;
• Risk of inconsistency, data loss and difficulty communicating with suppliers.

Even with a partial decision engine implemented in 2021, the gains were limited and didn’t meet market best practices.

The turning point: Linkana arrives

In 2022, XP adopted Linkana as its central supplier due diligence platform, integrating it into its technology ecosystem (COUPA and ERP). This change was marked by two major challenges:

1. Serasa integration: including the Serasa score within Linkana’s consolidated score;

2. Three-system integration (COUPA, Linkana and ERP): data standardization and automation of the entire onboarding and due diligence flow.

After overcoming these obstacles, XP automated due diligence and followed market standards, resulting in significant efficiency and quality gains.

Concrete results

After deployment, XP achieved:

• Due diligence time reduction: from 30–45 minutes to just 10–15 minutes;
• Productivity increase and manual error reduction;
• 100% auditable process: documents and history centralized in the platform;
• Higher governance and risk mitigation, with access to multiple data sources and automated monitoring;
• Better supplier communication, with centralized records and friendly interface;
• Fraud reduction with automated bank data validation via micro-deposit;
• Integrated ESG Rating, providing native insights into supplier social-environmental criteria.

Additional benefits for internal areas

Beyond operational improvements, areas like compliance, risk and accounts payable reported:

• Decrease in payment returns;
• Easier document analysis;
• Risk reduction and greater process security.

Next steps: continuous evolution

Even with the advances, XP keeps investing in improvements with Linkana:

• Supplier performance evaluation: use of category-customized forms, with stakeholder support;
• Enhanced risk matrix, based on the Kraljic methodology, to prioritize critical suppliers and speed up low-risk processes;
• Full integration of partner areas within the platform, unifying compliance and audit flows into a single environment.

According to Letícia Bastos:

“Linkana’s arrival was our turning point. We transformed our operational efficiency, raised service quality and today we have much more robust, auditable supplier management aligned with market best practices.”

Conclusion

The XP Inc case demonstrates how digitization and automation of supplier management can generate significant gains in productivity, security, governance and supplier collaboration.

With the XP and Linkana partnership, due diligence stopped being an operational bottleneck and became a strategic differentiator for the company.