When Richard Aland reflects on his 45 years in finance, he sees a journey defined by purpose. A veteran investment banker who worked for various municipal and state projects, Aland eventually reached a turning point. "I had financed governments for a long time," he says. "But I wanted to do something that could enable governments to help them procure more efficiently."
That idea became the foundation for Demand Pooling Global Services (DEPO), a platform designed to bring governments and businesses together through what Aland calls Collaborative Buying, a model that combines the purchasing power of multiple public entities to secure better pricing from private suppliers. It's a concept rooted in a lifetime of observing how public finance operates.
Before DEPO, Aland's work was defined by the complexities of public capital markets. As a municipal finance specialist, he advised major transit systems in Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Diego. His early projects taught him that governments, though vast in scale, often operate in silos, missing opportunities to pool demand and leverage collective scale.
"When you look inside the system," Aland says, "you see thousands of departments each making independent purchasing decisions. There are more than 90,000 local government entities in the U.S. alone. Imagine the efficiency if more of those entities could coordinate."
The vision behind DEPO grew from this insight. Instead of following the traditional procurement systems that require governments to manage contracts individually, DEPO's structure allows multiple buyers to express demand for similar goods, including fire trucks, fuel, school buses, and even police helicopters, while maintaining their own specifications. "Collaborative buying doesn't mean identical buying," Aland says. "It means you can keep what makes your product unique while benefiting from the volume discount that comes with scale."
For governments, the appeal is straightforward: save money and maintain autonomy. For vendors, the benefits lie in access to more markets without the overhead of pursuing them individually. DEPO charges suppliers a small percentage only when they win a contract, never for participating. "We wanted to remove any resistance from the government side," Aland says. "So the platform is free for them. The vendors only pay when they succeed."
That pay-for-performance model reflects both Aland's pragmatic instincts and his public-minded philosophy. Having spent decades advising on municipal finance, he understands the pressures that governments face: limited budgets, strict procurement laws, and growing scrutiny from taxpayers who expect value for every dollar. His goal was to design a system that works within those constraints while benefiting everyone involved.
Despite its broad implications, DEPO is built on a lean, asset-light model. The company doesn't buy, sell, or hold inventory. Instead, it acts as a facilitator, a neutral marketplace that connects verified vendors with qualified buyers through competitive sealed bids. "We are not part of the contracts," Aland says. "We just make the process easier, faster, and fairer."
The result is a platform that, while still expanding, has the potential for remarkable scalability. With tens of thousands of government entities in the U.S. and even more across Europe, the opportunity is global. "Europe may be an even larger market," Aland says. "Every government there has its own procurement laws, and that creates an enormous opportunity for efficiency."
For Aland, DEPO represents the culmination of a career spent at the intersection of finance, governance, and innovation. It's not a pivot away from his past but a continuation of it. "I have already had my career," he says. "This is about leaving a significant impact."
In many ways, Richard Aland's story is a rare one. A financier who turned his expertise toward public good without losing sight of economic logic. With DEPO, he's proving that smarter systems don't have to cost more; they just have to connect the right people.
