In February of this year a major finance automation platform changed its entire fee structure. Zero implementation fees. Zero subscription fees until go-live. Revenue earned only as a fraction of actual savings delivered based on measurable P&L impact.
When a vendor bets its own revenue on your results, it is worth asking what that signals about where the market is heading. Someplace un-ventured for some!
It is not an isolated move. It is a visible marker of a shift that has been building across finance and GBS for several years and is now arriving at scale. The era of paying for access, for activity, for effort, and for presence is ending. What is replacing it is a simpler and more demanding standard.
That question now being asked of vendors and customers is “Did it work?” and “Prove it”. It is being asked of transformation programs. It is being asked of GBS functions by CFOs who have watched significant investment produce underwhelming returns. And I honestly think most finance ops and GBS organizations are not structurally prepared to answer it.
How We Got Here
The traditional model for measuring GBS performance was built around inputs and activities. How many FTEs? How many transactions processed? What does it cost per invoice? How does headcount compare to peers on a per billion revenue basis?
Those metrics made sense for an operating model built around people doing transactional work at scale. They still work very well for many internal functions. If the fundamental value proposition is labor consolidation and cost arbitrage, then measuring labor cost and transaction volume is logical.
The problem is that the value proposition has shifted and the measurement model has not caught up.
CFOs are no longer primarily interested in whether GBS is running efficiently relative to a peer benchmark. Benchmarks still matter but they are interested in whether GBS is contributing to enterprise outcomes. Working capital. Revenue velocity. Close cycle time. Risk reduction. The questions being asked at the CFO level are P&L and balance sheet questions, not process efficiency questions.
That shift in what the business expects from GBS is exactly what is driving the broader move toward outcome based thinking. And it is happening simultaneously across three dimensions that GBS leaders need to understand.
The Vendor Dimension
The finance technology market is restructuring around outcomes because the previous model was structurally misaligned with what customers actually need.
The seat based SaaS model charged for access regardless of whether that access produced results. Implementation fees were collected before value was delivered. Subscription fees ran whether adoption was high or low, whether the process improved or not, whether the CFO could point to a single measurable return.
That model is increasingly indefensible when AI agents are designed to deliver quantifiable, real time business results that can be measured precisely and attributed directly.
I spoke with Samantha Olivares and Vikram Gollakota at HighRadius about what drove their decision to move to outcome based pricing. What they described was not primarily a commercial calculation but a pretty significant governance insight. Their 24 month controlled experiment comparing customers who aligned formally on success criteria before implementation against those who did not produced a clear result. The customers with measurable baselines, defined targets, and executive sign-off on what success looked like consistently outperformed those without it. The ones without formal alignment ended up in an implementation and enhancement loop that frustrated both sides.
The commercial model change followed the governance insight. Customers who are aligned on outcomes succeed. Customers who are not, do not. So price the relationship accordingly.
That logic will spread beyond any single vendor. GBS leaders who understand it will be better positioned in every vendor conversation they have from this point forward.
The Internal Dimension
The more consequential shift is not in how vendors price their services. It is in how GBS leaders make the case for their function internally.
The GBS organizations that are winning the internal credibility argument right now are not the ones only presenting benchmark comparisons to their CFOs. They are the ones translating operational performance into enterprise financial impact.
DSO improvement is a process metric. The working capital it frees is a balance sheet metric. Invoice dispute reduction is an operational metric. The revenue it protects and accelerates is a P&L metric. Days to close is a finance operations metric. The decision making speed it enables for the business is a strategic metric.
Most GBS functions are measuring and reporting in the first column. The CFO lives in the second column. The translation between those two columns is where GBS either gains strategic influence or remains a cost center that gets benchmarked and squeezed.
Outcome based thinking forces that translation. It requires GBS leaders to define what they are delivering in terms the business actually cares about, establish a baseline before they start, and measure impact in a way that connects directly to enterprise value.
That is a harder discipline to build than process efficiency reporting. It requires cleaner data, better attribution methodology, and a willingness to be held accountable to numbers that are visible at the CFO and board level. But it is the discipline that changes the conversation about what GBS is worth.
The Transformation Dimension
The same logic applies to how GBS transformations are designed and governed.
Most transformation programs are structured around activities and milestones. Phase one complete. System configured. Training delivered. Go-live achieved. These are reasonable project management markers but they are not outcome measures. A transformation can hit every milestone and still fail to deliver the business impact it was funded to produce.
The disconnect between transformation activity and transformation outcome is one of the most persistent and expensive problems in GBS. It is why Alvarez and Marsal found that 65 percent of PE backed companies delivered less than half the operational value they planned. The plans were real. The milestones were achieved. The outcomes did not follow because the program was never actually structured around delivering them.
Outcome based transformation design looks different from the start. It begins with a precise definition of what success looks like at the business level, not the project level. It establishes clean baselines before any work begins. It builds measurement into the program architecture rather than treating reporting as a post-implementation activity. And it creates explicit accountability for the gap between baseline and target throughout the life of the program, not just at the end.
This is what the HighRadius, Mutually Agreed Success Criteria (MASC) framework is actually describing when applied to internal transformation rather than vendor contracting. The customers who aligned formally on outcomes before implementation outperformed those who did not. That finding applies equally to any significant internal initiative. The discipline of agreeing on what success looks like before the work starts is not a vendor management practice. It is a transformation management practice.
What Building This Capability Actually Looks Like
Start with the business outcome, not the process metric. Before any transformation initiative, GBS improvement program, or vendor engagement, define success in terms the CFO would use to evaluate it. Not DSO. Working capital freed. Not invoice cycle time. Revenue protected from dispute leakage. That translation should happen at the design stage, not the reporting stage.
Establish baselines before the work starts. This is the step most consistently skipped under time pressure and the one most consistently cited in post-mortems as the reason impact could not be demonstrated. No baseline means no proof. No proof means the next budget conversation is a negotiation based on opinion rather than evidence.
Build attribution into your measurement architecture. Outcomes in GBS have multiple causes. Market conditions, customer behavior, pricing changes, and system configuration all affect the metrics you are being measured against. Organizations that can distinguish between improvement that came from their transformation work and improvement that came from external factors are in a fundamentally stronger position both internally and in vendor negotiations.
Report in enterprise language, not GBS language. The audience for GBS performance reporting is increasingly the CFO and the board, not the shared services leadership team. The reporting architecture should be built for that audience from the start. Operational metrics belong in operational dashboards. Enterprise impact belongs in the conversation with the business.
The Implication
Outcome based thinking is not a trend that GBS leaders can observe from a distance and adopt gradually. It is arriving in vendor contracts, in CFO expectations, and in how transformation programs are being evaluated right now.
The organizations that are ahead of this shift share a characteristic. They stopped measuring what was easy to count and started measuring what the business actually cares about. That sounds simple. It requires rebuilding how GBS defines success, structures programs, manages vendors, and reports performance from the ground up.
The vendors who have moved to outcome based pricing have already done that work on their side of the relationship. HighRadius spent 24 months proving the model before they launched it. They know exactly what success looks like, how to measure it, and how to govern the relationship around it.
The question for GBS leaders is whether the same is true on the customer side. I suspect in large part that it is not and I plan to write about how organizations need to make this transition. If it is already, outcome based contracting and outcome based transformation are significant opportunities. Aligned incentives, shared accountability, and results measured in enterprise financial terms.
If it is not, the shift is still coming. It will just arrive as pressure rather than opportunity.
The work of building that capability starts before the vendor contract lands on your desk. It starts with how you define success for the next initiative you are about to launch.
Ian P. Thompson is a finance operations and GBS executive with over 30 years of experience. He writes the Clear Cycle Dispatch for finance operations and GBS leaders who want to understand how the work is actually changing. If someone forwarded this to you and you want to receive future issues, subscribe at https://lnkd.in/eMfv4FMv