Opportunity
Lucca’s software already helped more than one million end-users with complex accounting tasks. But finance and administrative managers were still spending too much time on clunky expense processes. So Lucca decided to give them even more freedom and efficiency by automizing purchasing and expenses.
Solution
By partnering with Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service, Lucca put banking features right at the center of their product. Lucca’s customers can now create their own accounts, with cards for employees to manage expenses, and automated payments for a streamlined experience.
Impact
With 30 million euros processed by card payments in the first half of 2024 alone, Lucca’s rapidly scaling usage is a testament to the excellent user experience they built, and a significant revenue stream for the company. Lucca’s strategic choice to embed banking features significantly enhances administrative operations and employee experiences, positioning the company to dominate the European HR software market.
Lucca, a leading HR software provider, has leveraged embedded banking to enhance user experiences and streamline operations. Since its creation in 2002, Lucca has consistently refined its offerings to meet the evolving needs of HR professionals. The company recently experienced an especially remarkable acceleration of its growth driven by substantial investments in research and development and innovative strategies like embedding banking features with Swan.
Embedded banking drives Lucca's range of financial products — card usage triples in one year!
By putting financial features right at the center of their product, Lucca was able to centralize and automate financial processes. Customers can now create accounts with employee cards for managing expenses and automated payments, streamlining their experience. Offering cards and accounts as part of their regular subscription, Lucca now controls the entire UX, enhancing expense processes for companies.
Both transaction numbers and volumes have more than tripled in the past year. Through Lucca’s card product, Cleemy, the company processed over €40 million, with an impressive €30 million in the first half of 2024 alone. This level of growth is set to continue.
A banking upgrade ensures users stick around
Adding banking and payments was a natural next step for Lucca. Their one million end-users already appreciated the way it handles complex accounting tasks. Now, they offer even better operational efficiency with automated purchasing and expense management, empowered by embedded banking features.
Even if they don’t realize it yet, HR support functions crave tools with embedded banking!
Groupe Gambetta has been a longstanding customer of Lucca. Maxime Choisnet, CFO, describes how well-loved the new features are, focusing on Cleemy Expenses:
"We use the application to manage our expense reports. The tool has been accepted by all our employees. For the accounting teams, the tool is a real plus and brings great reactivity.”
The value of each new feature is so obvious, that companies are more than willing to pay the extra subscription fees.
How Purchasing & Supplier billing is improved
All team members benefit from easier billing processes. Before, an events manager had to endure lengthy approval processes to book hotel rooms for a team-building event, while a content manager navigated multiple steps to obtain credit for translations, often paying out-of-pocket and waiting for reimbursement.
Now, with Lucca's system, any employee can request virtual cards for their purchases, allowing them to get what they need quickly and efficiently. These virtual cards enable employees to make purchases autonomously, eliminating the hassle of reimbursement. Once a purchase is made, they simply attach the bill, simplifying accounting. By placing more financial decision-making in the hands of employees and managers, companies empower their teams to act swiftly while keeping finances under control.
Banking features make life easier — for both companies AND employees! Here are the banking features that enable Lucca to build such a great employee experience by streamlining operations for HR and finance teams:
💳 Expense cards (virtual or physical) easily let users pay for whatever they need, when they need. Employees don’t pay out of pocket while admins ensure financial control.
✅ Payment control. Let managers and admin set controls that automatically approve or block expenses based on predefined criteria. You could give interns a card with 100 euros for the year so they are autonomous to buy croissants and coffee for morning meetings! 🥐
🔁 Transactions are automatically synchronized - the date, supplier, everything, is filled out in advance. Accountants and HR managers save so much time that was previously wasted on data entry!
🔐 Fraud protection. With deep financial integrations, you can’t modify details like the date, source, or bank. Data is more reliable and fraud is hard to achieve.
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What was it like building expense cards with Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service?
Lucca’s team of one product manager and five developers integrated Swan in three steps: first, they added payment accounts, then single-use cards, and then permanent cards after that. Integration by API allowed them to easily synchronize their new cards with their existing expense app.
”We really liked Swan’s proximity and accessibility. Natural discussions continued all the way through integration and delivery. The team was available on Slack, and they were very easy to talk with even about technical issues.” says Mathilde Fossat, Product Manager at Lucca. With past partners, Lucca sometimes waited 2 weeks to get a response about a technical problem, halting their work, but “being able to exchange with Swan’s Technical Account Managers on Slack changed everything.”
The team also appreciated access to many resources:
“As a product manager, it was really nice to have access to Swan’s dashboard, Sandbox, the documentation. Everything was practical: ordering cards, testing transactions, authorizations.”
Ready-to-go interfaces for the account opening process also proved helpful:
”Swan’s nocode onboarding form was especially practical. Our customers only have to use it once, when they’re opening an account. And it’s so smooth because Swan included a register that finds companies by name and pre-fills all their info. The experience is great.”
Each transaction brings added revenue to Lucca
Lucca boosts their revenue per user with each banking feature introduced, and rapidly scaling usage is a testament to the great user experience they have built. As usage grows, this added revenue continues to rise over time. For example, Lucca has already issued nearly 6,000 payment cards and is currently issuing twice as many cards compared to the same time last year.
The usage of these cards is even more illustrative: both the number of transactions and the transaction volume have more than tripled over the past year. With up to 40,000 transactions occurring monthly, Lucca has processed 42 million euros from cards alone, with an impressive 30 million of that amount in the first half of 2024 alone. So where does the revenue come from? It doesn’t just come from added subscription fees, but also from Swan’s revenue-sharing model.
In short: banks or financial institutions, such as Swan, collect transaction fees whenever a customer uses a debit card to make purchases. Although each fee is tiny, they can accumulate into significant revenue, which Swan shares with its partners.
HR tech and embedded banking fit together like a dream. 💭
The best HR software contributes to a better employee experience, streamlines operations for HR and finance teams, and reduces administrative burden for all. Embedded banking is the way to do it and Lucca’s financial products range is a fantastic example of just how well it works.
Lucca’s well-established HR software already masterfully handled complex accounting flows. Now, with banking features placed right at the core, it’s so much simpler.
Thinking about building banking services into your own product? Have a chat with our team to explore what you could build.
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