Nicolas Benady, CEO at Swan, says that the fundraising is significant for reinforcing the quality and scale of their product, and it’s also notable for their customers.
With Swan, it’s reportedly easy for European companies “to embed banking into their own product and reap the benefits.”
Nicolas also mentioned that he’s been in active in the payments and banking space for 15 years, and he felt like the industry was “not well designed.” It was unnecessarily complex. Long, convoluted sales processes, “insane” amounts of paperwork. Expensive. Slow. Since then, they’ve seen the SaaS revolution, they’ve seen iPhone.
He added that people can “make complex things easy, with great design, with thoughtfulness. That’s what Swan is all about.”
At Swan, they claim to care about “great” product design in the payments and banking space and this is what motivates Nicolas every day.
With his co-founders Nicolas and Mathieu, they launched Swan “to make it genuinely easy for European entrepreneurs to add banking features to their core product.”
They built BaaS, SaaS-style! And they rethought every part of the process, “from discovery to testing, to integration and launch. Everything should be super easy, fast, and reliable.”
The firm also noted that they wanted to productize Banking-as-a-Service.
In 2019, they registered the company and “were more than a year in stealth, laser-focused on technical development and getting a solid regulatory framework in place.”
Eventually, they began speaking with companies who “wanted to launch banking products without having to build out entirely new departments like banking ops and compliance.”
Fast forward three more years, and their original vision of a truly easy Banking-as-a-Service platform has become a reality.
Swan runs behind the scenes of 100 European companies like Pennylane, Alma, and Agicap.
They have all “elevated their product with embedded banking features and created new revenue streams.” Some companies, like Expensya, have even “tripled their average revenue per user by adding cards to their offering.”
Companies across 16 different sectors have already embedded banking with Swan, including Financial Management SaaS, HR SaaS, and BNPL, to name just a few.
They use their embedded banking platform for card issuing, localized banking accounts, automated SEPA transfers, and more. They’ve processed over €7 billion for them so far, but that’s just “the tip of the iceberg.”
Up to now, they’ve allowed companies “to do the basics like open accounts, issue cards, and do payments for their end-users.”
Next up, they’ll allow them “to accept payments in all formats.” They have launched SEPA Direct Debit already and are currently “building card acquisition.” This is the newest strategic direction they’re taking and “was a significant request required by many customers, especially for companies innovating in more traditional sectors like real estate.”
All their upcoming new product lines — payment collection, international credit transfers, and embedded lending — are “tailored to large organizations, like the Spanish scale-up Factorial and Carrefour, who recently completed a successful cashback program with Swan.”
