For fast-growing retail brands, the ravine between commercial ambition and operational capability tends to open quietly. 

As transaction volumes increase the systems that supported early growth start to create drag rather than remove it. By the time the problem is visible, it is usually diagnosed as being rather extensive to resolve.

Matthew Nott has managed finance teams through these exact growth phases. He worked on the expansion of tea retailer T2 and the global scaling of skin, hair and body care brand Aesop, to the point at which it was acquired by L’Oreal in 2023 in a deal valued at $2.53 billion USD. 

Now, as Chief Financial Officer at premium cycling brand MAAP, oversees the financial operations of a company expanding across eight countries on the same platform. 

MAAP was founded in Melbourne in 2014 and now operates via e-commerce, wholesale, and a growing physical retail network.

When Nott joined, the technology stack was divided. A financial platform operated in isolation from the inventory tool, and reconciling sales across channels was a manual, convoluted process.

Speaking during a panel session at SuiteConnect 2026, Oracle NetSuite’s annual customer conference, Nott described the moment high-growth businesses outrun their systems. For leaders navigating that transition, his view on what the technology needs to do was clear.

“[For any other businesses in a similar high-growth] stage, where you’re scaling up, you really want to think about ensuring that your technology is going to enable your growth and not hold it back,” he said.

“Often, the times where a business has been growing for a period of time, and there’s a moment where the scale and the high growth start to arise, you’ll quickly outgrow systems.

You really need to be thinking about a tool. In our case, that involves multi-entity, multi-currency, real-time data and reporting, consolidation, and intercompany.” 

MAAP’s Netsuite implementation, delivered in partnership with Annexa, brought all the company’s transactional data into a single system; financials, inventory, costing, and sales across every channel and subsidiary. Live feeds from e-commerce and point-of-sale now consolidate in real time across all eight operating countries.

“Those things from a Netsuite context are just a given, built in from the ground up, so that doesn’t become part of your decision making when you’re scaling, it’s an enabler for scaling,” Nott said.     

The AI mandate

At the same event, NetSuite outlined its next-generation product direction, NetSuite Next.

AI capabilities are being introduced continuously across the platform, with NetSuite Next bringing these advancements into a more unified, embedded experience within the ERP core. The solution is expected to be available within the next 12 months.

The release will introduce Ask Oracle, a contextual natural language assistant, alongside autonomous close capabilities designed to reduce month-end friction.

AI agents will monitor financials throughout the period, flag anomalies, and handle reconciliations automatically. The goal is a zero-day close managed through AI operating in the background.

Nott expects to consume AI capabilities directly through core vendors rather than building separate models. He favours this integrated approach. 

“We’re very much at the start of experimenting with AI … we’re really expecting to rely on our vendors and NetSuite as our core system to deliver a lot of these tools for us to then better use, as opposed to the potential for trying to stitch together your own agentic AI models and having a gigantic technology team to support that,” he said.

“We want to really keep the relationship with our customers pretty human. But even in that space, we think product visualisation and those things are incredibly useful in terms of speed to market,” he said.

The announcement is welcome news for Australian-based ERP and NetSuite systems integrator Annexa, which had worked closely with MAAP on its integration. 

“Customers have been coming to us for advice on how they can apply AI capabilities, particularly as they’re emerging across NetSuite and the wider technology ecosystem,” Annexa Director Matthew Owens said during a separate webinar. 

“There’s a huge amount of opportunity there, and a big part of our work now is helping teams identify where AI can genuinely improve business processes and how to introduce it safely into operational systems.”

Doing more with the same resources

Finance leaders are asking a consistent question across the industry. The focus has shifted from managing immediate scale to driving long-term efficiency without proportionally expanding headcount.

MAAP is continuing to grow, and Nott’s confidence in the current technology stack to support that expansion is high, and his attention has shifted to the question that sits behind it, how to extract more output from the same team as the business scales.

“We’re continuing to focus on growth, and we’re still in a high-growth phase. We’re wanting to open more stores in more countries and regions,” he said. 

“The pleasing thing to me is that to do that within our current tech stack environment, the technology is in no way holding us back. 

“The theme that I hear from a lot of other CFOs is, how are we going to do more with less? We’re not necessarily wanting to reduce our resources overall, but we just want them to be able to do more and allow them to grow and achieve more.

“These tools that are coming to market are constantly blowing me away with what they can do, so there’s a real preparation to take advantage of them.” 

Getting the foundations right

The efficiency gains Nott described on the panel at SuiteConnect depend heavily on what happens before and after go-live. During a separate webinar discussing international growth strategy for retail brands, he was candid about where the complexity concentrates.

“The integration is the devil in the detail. The integration is the hardest part of the entire thing. That’s the area, one hundred per cent, to be aware of and focus on,” Nott said.

Nott had worked with Matthew Owens, director of Annexa, in a previous role and brought him in when it came time to scope a solution for MAAP. 

Managing multiple third-party logistics providers across different markets has been one of the more demanding elements of the build, with MAAP changing 3PL providers more than once since go-live, each move requiring new technical connections.

Annexa’s Owens understands what retailers need from a systems integrator at this stage of growth, noting that the conversation should start with commercial understanding rather than software features.

“It’s not so much about buying a bit of software and understanding the features of a module. It’s about, can the partner or the system integrators that I’m speaking with understand holistically how to run an online retail business?”

“And how are you going to enable us to actually facilitate growth, expansion, integrations and do it in a way that’s going to be quick to market and sustainable to support?” he said.

“Getting the core system live is the big project, the big change. But equally important is how you sustain it. Do you have the right partnerships and people available when you need them?”

“This is important not just for keeping the lights on but also for the bigger ticket innovation initiatives that retailers can take on,” he said.

Annexa has supported a number of Australian retail and consumer brands through similar transitions. 

For example, Aussie skincare brand Ultra Violette replatformed its operations across five global markets in six months, moving from fragmented systems to a single integrated ERP built for scale. 

Meanwhile, Davie Group, best known for The Oodie, overhauled its global fulfilment model, shifting from a 4PL structure to direct 3PL integrations embedded in NetSuite, unlocking real-time visibility and reducing fulfilment delays to under 24 hours.

Furthermore, Global biotech company Life Cykel’s move to NetSuite gave the business the operational visibility and control needed to enter the competitive US retail market, a step that fragmented legacy systems would have made significantly harder to execute with confidence.

For growing retail brands, the technology decisions made during periods of high growth tend to compound, in both directions.

The right foundations enable speed, visibility, and efficiency at scale. The wrong ones cause operational drag that is expensive to diagnose and harder to unwind. 

As embedded AI shifts from emerging capability to standard infrastructure, the businesses best placed to take advantage will be those that already have their data, systems, and integrations in order.

Annexa’s Owens said this positioning will really drive how effective AI can be from an embedded operation perspective.

“A big part of what’s changing right now in AI is how it’s starting to show up inside the systems that finance teams rely on every day,”

“That’s where it becomes more relevant, because it’s no longer sitting outside the business as a separate tool, it’s starting to influence the workflows and decisions happening inside core systems.” he said