Quick heads up — I'm taking point on the Salesforce renewal this quarter. Already in talks with our rep Jenna, looking good so far. Should have a draft proposal by end of next week 🤞
Great, keep us posted on the commercial terms. Last year's uplift was painful.
Absolutely — I'm pushing hard on the per-seat pricing. Jenna seems receptive. Will share the draft when it lands.
Doing a pass on the vendor register. Several 'Last Reviewed' dates are stale — Modulr last reviewed Oct 2024, Onfido Nov 2024, Stripe Feb 2025. We're supposed to review annually at minimum. Who owns these?
Stripe is mine, I'll schedule a review this month.
I can pick up Onfido review — I've been closest to them operationally anyway.
Thanks both. Modulr still unowned — anyone?
I thought that was Ben's? @ben-cooper are you still the Modulr contact?
I handled the original onboarding but I don't think I was ever formally assigned as owner. Bit of a gap tbh.
Reminder that the AWS Enterprise Support renewal window opens April 1. Finance need a heads-up 60 days prior so flagging now. Current contract runs to June 30.
Good shout. Let's make sure we get the usage reports from DevOps before we go into renewal talks — they usually have leverage data there.
Agreed. I'll ping alex-reed to pull the last 6 months of cost explorer data.
Can someone confirm who owns the Modulr relationship day-to-day? Need to raise a query about settlement timing and I don't know who to go through internally.
Still a bit unclear as per earlier thread. I can forward you the account manager contact for now — her name is Diane. But we really need to formalise ownership.
Fine. Send me Diane's details. But yeah this needs sorting properly.
Adding 'assign Modulr owner' to the vendor governance actions list.
Started the Onfido annual review. Pulled together usage stats and SLA performance. Overall decent — 99.1% uptime last quarter. Will have a written summary by end of week.
Anyone know if we have a signed copy of the Jumio DPA on file? Legal are asking and I can't find it in the vendor folder on Drive.
I think it got filed under 'KYC Providers' subfolder rather than Jumio directly. Let me check.
Found it — it's in /Vendor Contracts/KYC Providers/Jumio/Legal. Sharing the link in DM.
Update on Salesforce: had a great call with Jenna this morning. She's putting together a revised proposal with a 5% discount on the Sales Cloud licences. Really positive momentum here.
What's the contract length they're proposing?
They're pushing for 3 years but I'm negotiating down to 2. Should know more by next week.
Pulled the AWS cost explorer data for Priya — sharing in the #devops channel. Summary: we're at 73% of Enterprise Support tier threshold, so strong case for pushing back on price.
got the Meridian invoice for Q1 — it's way higher than expected. £45k over what we agreed. Greg says it's a 'volume tier recalculation' which is... vague. anyone dealt with this kind of thing with them before?
£45k over?? That's not vague, that's a significant variance. Do you have the original signed order form with the volume tiers spelled out?
looking for it now. I think it's in the contracts folder but the tiers might have been in an appendix. will dig it out.
We had a similar thing with a previous provider — check whether the tier thresholds are cumulative or per-period. That's usually where the ambiguity comes in.
Do not approve payment until this is resolved. Escalate to finance now.
yeah agreed, I've already flagged to fatima to hold the payment. Greg said he'd send a detailed breakdown but hasn't yet.
Quick note: Twilio contract auto-renews on April 15 unless we give 30 days notice. Are we happy to continue or should we be reviewing alternatives? @marcus-williams you had thoughts on this last quarter.
Still think we should at least benchmark against Vonage/MessageBird. But 30 days from April 15 means we'd need to decide by March 16... which is today. What's the current monthly spend?
Around £8k/month. I don't think we have time to run a proper evaluation before the deadline so probably easier to let it renew and do a proper review for next year.
Let it renew. We're mid-sprint and I'm not ripping out the Twilio integration for a benchmarking exercise.
Confirming I've put the Meridian Q1 invoice on hold pending dispute resolution. chris-dawson please keep me in the loop on timeline — we need to book this one way or another before month end.
Onfido annual review complete — shared the doc in the vendor folder. TL;DR: SLA performance good, pricing fair vs market, contract runs to Sept 2026 so no immediate action needed. One flag: we're at 78% of our monthly API call limit consistently. Might want to look at tier upgrade.
Good flag on the API limit. If we're at 78% consistently we'll hit the cap during any volume spike. Worth getting a quote on the next tier.
Will reach out to our Onfido CSM and get indicative pricing. Their tiers jump quite a bit so want to understand the cost before recommending.
found the Meridian contract. The volume tiers ARE in appendix B but the wording is genuinely ambiguous — the thresholds could be read either way. Sent it to emma-taylor to take a look from a legal angle.
On it. Will review today.
Reviewed. The language is ambiguous as chris-dawson says, but our interpretation (per-period, not cumulative) is reasonable and defensible. I'd push back on Meridian's reading and request their calculation methodology in writing.
great, thanks emma. I'll go back to Greg with that today.
Raising my hand to take on Modulr relationship ownership going forward if no one else wants it. I know the account already and it makes sense for continuity.
Perfect. I'll update the vendor register. Please do the overdue annual review as a priority — it's 5 months stale.
AWS renewal meeting set for April 3. Attendees: me, alex-reed, and the AWS account team. I'll share the agenda in advance. Goal is to hold the support tier cost flat and potentially get some credits applied.
chased Meridian again. Greg says he's escalating internally to their finance team and will 'come back to us shortly'. no ETA given. still no detailed breakdown of the recalculation methodology either.
'Shortly' isn't good enough for month-end. Can you push for a specific date — ideally by March 27?
will do, sending now.
If we don't hear by EOD Friday I'd suggest looping in their commercial director rather than just Greg. Do we have that contact?
I don't have it directly but I can ask Greg for it. Good idea.
Stripe annual review done — report in the vendor folder. SLA 99.95%, pricing competitive, no issues. Contract auto-renews in August, I'll flag again closer to the time.
Salesforce update: Jenna sent the revised proposal this morning. 2-year term, 5% discount on Sales Cloud, flat pricing on Service Cloud. Think this is solid — will circulate the full doc for sign-off.
Please share the doc — want to check the payment terms and termination clause before we give the green light.
Sharing now! Link in DM. Super excited about this one — Jenna really came through 💪
Vendor register updated: ben-cooper assigned as Modulr owner. Stripe review date refreshed. Onfido review date refreshed. Still outstanding: Meridian (on hold pending dispute), Salesforce (in progress per daniel-wright).
Greg came back — Meridian won't commit to a credit note before end of March. Says their finance cycle doesn't allow it. Earliest is mid-April apparently. fatima-hassan this a problem?
It's not ideal but I can park it in 'disputed invoices' for now. As long as we have something in writing from them acknowledging the dispute I can manage the month-end books around it.
I'll get that in writing from Greg today — an email confirming they acknowledge the dispute and are reviewing is enough right?
Yes that's fine. Email confirmation is sufficient.
Had intro call with Diane at Modulr today. Flagged the ownership gap, she was fine about it. Will schedule the overdue review for next week. Also — heads up that Modulr are releasing a new API version in May, we'll need to check compatibility with our integration.
I'll need a heads up on the API changes at least 3 weeks before go-live. Don't let that one sneak up on us.
Noted. I'll get the migration guide from Diane and share it here when I have it.
DataDog contract renewal coming up — expires May 31. Current annual cost ~£62k. Should we be reviewing scope/usage before auto-renewing? We provisioned a lot of monitors in Q4 that might not all be necessary now.
Good call. I can do a monitor audit. Some of the ones we spun up for the Dec go-live are probably redundant now.
Great. If we can show reduced usage we might be able to negotiate down. I'll contact our DataDog rep in parallel.
Does anyone know the current status on the SendGrid/Twilio account consolidation? We're paying for both separately and I thought there was a plan to merge billing.
I think that got deprioritised after the Q4 platform work. Not sure where it landed. @ryan-kelly do you know?
No idea. Was never formally assigned to anyone as far as I know.
Classic. I'll add it to the vendor governance backlog.
Flagging an issue from this morning: we hit the Onfido API rate limit during the morning KYC batch run. About 340 verifications queued and delayed by ~90 mins. lena-park this is the scenario we flagged last month — we really need to look at upgrading the tier now.
Agreed, this confirms it. I've been waiting on the pricing from their CSM — I'll chase today and push for an urgent response.
I have the CSM's direct number — want me to call rather than email?
Yes please call — faster. Get the tier pricing and ask if they can upgrade us mid-contract.
Spoke to Jamie at Onfido. They CAN upgrade mid-contract. Pro tier: £3,200/month (vs £1,800 now). Gets us 3x the call volume. He's sending formal quote today.
That's a significant jump but we don't really have a choice after today. I'll put a business case together for sign-off.
AWS meeting went well — they've agreed to hold Enterprise Support costs flat for the renewal year and applied £8k in usage credits. Not bad. Full summary in the vendor folder.
That usage data really helped. Worth pulling every year before renewals.
Exactly. I'm going to make it a standard part of the renewal prep checklist.
Onfido tier upgrade business case submitted to sarah-chen for approval. Upgrading from Standard to Pro: £1,400/month uplift, justified by today's incident and consistent 78%+ usage. Recommending we proceed.
Reviewed and approved. Please proceed with the upgrade. Sam — can you confirm with Jamie at Onfido?
On it — will confirm today and ask for the upgrade to be effective immediately.
Confirmed with Jamie. Upgrade effective April 9. New rate limits active from then.
Hi all — trying to put together the Q2 vendor budget forecast. Can someone tell me what the Salesforce renewal figure is going to land at? I need it for the forecast by April 17.
Hi Sofia! The proposal is £127k/year for 2 years. Pretty much locked in — just waiting on final sign-off from Sarah's side.
Thanks Daniel. Sarah — is that confirmed from your side for budget purposes?
I haven't formally approved yet — I flagged a couple of questions on the payment terms last week. @daniel-wright did you go back to Jenna on those?
Ah yes — I've got her response, just need to review it properly. Will come back to you today!
Ok, I'll use £127k as a placeholder for now and note it as pending. Please let me know if the number changes materially.
Modulr annual review done — report in vendor folder. Account is healthy. One thing to flag: we're on legacy API v1, and Modulr confirmed v1 is being deprecated in June 2026. We will need to migrate to v2. ryan-kelly I'd say this is now a priority engineering item.
June is not a lot of runway. How different is v2?
Diane is sending the v2 migration guide this week. From what she described it's a significant refactor of the authentication flow but the core payment endpoints are similar. I'd guess 2-3 weeks of dev work but ryan-kelly you'd know better once you see the docs.
Share the docs as soon as you have them. I'll need to get it in the sprint backlog ASAP.
Vendor register updated with review date and the v2 migration flag.
still nothing from Meridian on the Q1 invoice dispute. it's been a month. got the acknowledgement email from Greg back in March but since then complete silence. nina-volkov should I be escalating this formally?
Yes. Escalate now. Write to their commercial director, cc legal. One month with no resolution on a £45k dispute is not acceptable.
I can draft the escalation letter if helpful. We should reference the contract ambiguity, our interpretation, and request a written response within 5 business days.
yes please emma, that would be really helpful. I'll get you Greg's manager details — I tracked down a name on LinkedIn: Sophie Hartley, Head of Commercial at Meridian.
Keep me copied on all correspondence. The disputed amount is still sitting in our books and finance are asking questions.
Who's the PagerDuty account owner here? The integration token we use for the payment alerts expired and I'm trying to regenerate it. Need to know who has admin access to the account.
I think I set it up originally but I'm not sure I'm still the admin — there were some account changes last year. Let me check my email for the original login.
I have a PagerDuty login but I'm definitely not an admin. I think alex-reed might have been added as an owner during the infrastructure review last autumn?
I have a login but I'm not an owner either. Checked just now. The account owner email on the account is ops-admin@ which I think is a shared mailbox — do we know who monitors that?
Great. So nobody knows who owns the account. Can someone just get into the ops-admin mailbox and sort this out?
I'll raise with IT to get ops-admin mailbox access. Shouldn't take long. Sorry for the chaos.
Escalation letter to Meridian's Sophie Hartley sent this morning (cc: legal, chris-dawson, fatima-hassan). Gave them 5 business days to respond — that's EOD April 21. Let's see if this moves things.
Still trying to close out the Q2 budget forecast. I have Salesforce at £127k placeholder. @daniel-wright — any update on the sign-off status? The payment terms question Sarah raised?
All good — just finalising a couple of details with Jenna. Should have it wrapped up by end of week 🙌
Ok. I'll need the confirmed number by April 17 at the latest to hit the finance deadline.
PagerDuty sorted — got into the ops-admin mailbox via IT, reset the account owner to a named person (me for now), regenerated the integration token and sent it to ryan-kelly. Renewal also coming up in June FYI — added to the register.
Token confirmed working. Alerts flowing. Cheers.
Quick reminder: the Salesforce contract needs to be signed before April 30 if we want the pricing locked for the start of our next billing cycle. @daniel-wright please confirm status — I still haven't had a formal response on the payment terms query.
On it Sarah — speaking to Jenna later today. Will have something concrete for you by EOD.
Thanks. I need to see Jenna's response in writing before I can sign off.
DataDog usage audit done with alex-reed. We identified 47 redundant monitors that can be removed. Brings us down to a lower host count bracket. Potentially saves ~£12k on renewal. Meeting with DataDog rep set for April 22.
Meridian responded! Sophie Hartley came back today — she's acknowledging that the volume tier recalculation 'may not have been applied correctly' and is requesting 5 business days to review with their billing team. emma-taylor nina-volkov this feels like progress?
Definitely progress. 'May not have been applied correctly' is as close to an admission as you'll get before a credit note. Let's see what comes back by April 27.
Good. Don't let the 5 days slip. Set a calendar reminder to chase on April 27 if no update.
Really relieved to hear this. I'll keep the payment on hold until we see the credit note.
Onfido Pro tier confirmed active since April 9. No rate limit incidents since upgrade. Good call on moving quickly on that.
Quick question for anyone who's worked with Herbert Smith Freehills before — what's a typical turnaround time on a PSD2 compliance assessment once you've returned their questionnaire? Getting variable answers and trying to set realistic expectations internally.
From my experience it's 2–4 weeks depending on complexity. If there are remediation items they flag upfront you can be waiting longer. Best to ask them directly for a committed date.
Heads up: GitHub Enterprise renewal in July. Contract value ~£34k/year. Worth checking with engineering on seat utilisation — we might be over-licensed. @alex-reed can you pull active seat data?
On it. Will check the admin portal and come back with numbers.
DataDog renewal negotiation went well — they've agreed to a 7% reduction (from £62k to £57.7k) given the reduced host count. 1-year renewal recommended. Report in vendor folder.
Excellent work. Approve the renewal on those terms.
Q2 budget forecast submitted to finance (minus Salesforce which is still placeholder). @daniel-wright for the record, where does the Salesforce sign-off stand? Sarah said she hasn't received Jenna's written response yet as of last Friday.
Hi Sofia — all moving in the right direction. Jenna's been travelling but should have her response Monday.
Ok. Just to flag — April 30 deadline is a week away.
April 27 and still no formal credit note or resolution details from Meridian. Sophie Hartley responded to say their billing team needs 'a few more days'. I've pushed back and said we need something concrete by April 30. fatima-hassan heads up.
This is getting really difficult to manage from a finance perspective. If we don't have resolution by April 30 I'm going to need to escalate to the CFO.
I'd suggest we send a formal notice letter today making clear we will pursue formal dispute resolution if not resolved by April 30. That adds legal weight.
yes please emma, can you draft it? I'll forward Sophie Hartley's contact details.
Modulr v2 migration guide received from Diane and shared in #engineering-infra. ryan-kelly flagging here too — the auth changes are fairly significant. Guide says they recommend 4-6 weeks for migration and testing. June deadline is tight.
Read it. It's a pain but doable. I'm putting it in the next sprint. We'll need a staging environment that can hit Modulr's sandbox — ben-cooper can you get Diane to provision sandbox credentials?
Will ask her today.
Re: Salesforce — @daniel-wright I need Jenna's written response on the payment terms by EOD today. April 30 deadline is Thursday and I cannot sign a contract without seeing the full commercial terms. Please sort this today.
Absolutely Sarah — on a call with her at 2pm. Will have something for you today.
Thank you.
Vendor governance reminder: PagerDuty renewal in June needs a formal review before we auto-renew. chris-dawson you're now listed as owner — please schedule the review. Also Zendesk annual review is overdue by 2 months.
will add PagerDuty review to my list. Zendesk — is that mine too?
Zendesk is marcus-williams per the register.
Acknowledged — I'll do the Zendesk review this week.
Meridian update: Sophie Hartley confirmed by email that they will issue a credit note for £38,200 (not the full £45k but they're disputing a portion related to one specific volume spike in February). emma-taylor fatima-hassan — does partial credit work?
The £6.8k difference is the bit we'd need to push back on if we want the full amount. What's the February volume spike they're referring to?
Greg described it as a day in Feb where we had unusually high transaction volume — apparently it pushed us into a higher tier briefly. I can pull our transaction logs for that date.
I'd take the £38.2k now and pursue the remaining £6.8k as a separate item. Having something resolved before month end is valuable. sarah-chen do you agree?
Agreed. Accept the partial credit, thank Sophie, and open a separate dispute process for the £6.8k. Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good here.
accepted. will write to Sophie now. feels like I've aged about 10 years dealing with this invoice 😅
Update on Salesforce: spoke with Jenna. On the payment terms — she says they can offer Net 45 instead of Net 30 on the annual invoice. I think that addresses Sarah's query. Waiting for the revised doc from her.
Daniel — Net 45 helps but my query was specifically about the auto-renewal clause in section 12.3, not the payment terms. I flagged this three weeks ago. Has Jenna addressed that?
Ah — let me re-read your original notes. I may have mixed up the two points. I'll get back to her.
We've missed the April 30 deadline. Please sort this next week — contract now needs to start May 1 at the earliest. The pricing window is still open according to the proposal.
Meridian credit note received — £38,200 confirmed. Booking it against the Q1 disputed invoice. Net payable now £6,800 which we're treating as a separate open item. Thanks everyone for the persistence on this one. Especially chris-dawson and emma-taylor 🙏
GitHub Enterprise seat audit done: 94 licences purchased, 71 active in last 90 days. 23 dormant seats = ~£8.3k of annual spend if removed. priya-sharma I'll add this to the renewal brief.
Zendesk annual review done — in the vendor folder. Platform solid, SLAs met, no major issues. One note: we're using maybe 60% of the features we pay for in the Suite plan. Might be worth discussing whether we could downgrade to a cheaper plan. I'll put together a feature comparison.
Salesforce budget line is still showing as 'pending' in my forecast. @daniel-wright — any update? sarah-chen has the auto-renewal clause query been resolved?
Still waiting. @daniel-wright please update Sofia and me today on where this stands.
All good — Jenna is updating the contract language on 12.3 as we speak. Should have the revised doc by end of week.
Ok, noted. I'll keep the placeholder in the forecast for now.
Vendor register Q2 update complete. Summary: 8 of 14 tracked vendors are current on reviews. Remaining gaps: Salesforce (contract in progress), remaining £6.8k Meridian dispute (open), SendGrid/Twilio consolidation (backlog). PagerDuty and GitHub renewals coming in June/July.
Modulr v2 migration kicked off in this sprint. Sandbox credentials received. First phase is the auth layer refactor. FYI to anyone who has dependencies on the payment integration — we'll need a QA window before go-live. More details in #engineering-infra.
Minor Meridian update — sent formal notice about the remaining £6.8k dispute. Greg has acknowledged and escalated to Sophie again. Apparently the Feb volume spike data is being reviewed. I'm not holding my breath but at least it's moving.
Flagging: Cloudflare contract up for renewal August 1. Early renewal discount window opens June 1. Current spend ~£22k/year. Low complexity renewal — happy to handle. Just noting it for the calendar.
Anyone know if the Jumio contract has a most-favoured-nation clause? We're being approached by a competitor (Veriff) with pricing that's about 20% lower. Want to know if we can use that as leverage with Jumio before our October renewal.
Let me check the Jumio contract. I'll come back today.
No MFN clause in the current Jumio contract. But you can still use competitor pricing as negotiation leverage — it's common practice. I'd recommend getting a formal quote from Veriff in writing, then presenting it to Jumio in September.
Perfect. Will request a proper quote from Veriff. Could be a good saving.
@daniel-wright — I need a definitive answer on Salesforce by Monday May 11. If the revised contract with the corrected 12.3 language isn't in my inbox by then I'm going to need to understand why this has taken 8 weeks to close.
Modulr sandbox testing going well per ryan-kelly's team. Diane at Modulr has been responsive to queries. One issue flagged: our webhook endpoint configuration needs to be updated as part of the v2 migration — separate from the auth changes. ryan-kelly is across it.
Revised Salesforce contract landed this morning — Jenna has updated section 12.3 to require mutual written consent for auto-renewal (replaces the 30-day notice requirement). Sharing with sarah-chen now.
Finally received. Reviewing now — if it's clean I'll sign today.
I think you'll find it all in order! Jenna was great to work with on this, just needed a bit of back and forth to get the language right.
Contract reviewed. The 12.3 language is correct. Signing now. daniel-wright — please confirm countersignature received from Jenna and share the executed copy with sofia-garcia and fatima-hassan.
Countersigned copy received! Sharing with Sofia and Fatima now. Great outcome 🎉
Salesforce confirmed in the Q2 forecast — £127k/year, 2-year term. Budget line closed. Thanks daniel-wright and sarah-chen for getting this over the line. Only 8 weeks after it was first mentioned 😅
Executed Salesforce contract received and filed. First invoice due July 1 on Net 45 terms. All good from a finance perspective.
one more Meridian check-in — Sophie Hartley replied today, they're requesting our transaction logs for Feb 14 to validate the volume spike claim. I'll pull the data from the payments team and send it over. genuinely might be close to resolving the £6.8k now.
Good. Pull the data and send it. If the logs support our position (i.e. the spike was not sustained enough to trigger a full tier change) we have a strong case.
will get on it tomorrow morning. nearly there...
Housekeeping: Salesforce now updated in vendor register as active/contracted. Executed doc linked. Next review due May 2027. Good work everyone.
Zendesk feature comparison done — we're using 8 of 14 Suite features. Downgrading to Growth plan would save ~£14k/year but we'd lose some reporting features that the CX team use. Worth a conversation with CX before deciding. I'll set up a meeting.
GitHub Enterprise renewal brief drafted — recommending we remove 20 of the 23 dormant seats (keeping 3 as buffer for new hires) saving ~£7.2k. Will circulate for review before the July renewal meeting.
Modulr v2 migration update: auth layer complete and tested on sandbox. Moving to webhook config changes next week. On track for go-live before the June deprecation deadline, but it'll be close. No room for surprises.
Keeping Diane updated on progress. She's confirmed June 30 is the hard cutoff for v1. Let me know if you need anything from the Modulr side to unblock.
All good for now. Just need the webhook docs she mentioned — can you chase those?
sent transaction log extract to Sophie at Meridian for the Feb 14 spike review. covering 2 weeks either side of the date so they can see it was anomalous. fingers crossed this wraps up the £6.8k dispute. will update when I hear back.