I’m not obsessed with fundraising, but this news is big. It’s big for reinforcing the quality and scale of our product, and it’s also big for our customers. With Swan, it’s truly easy for European companies to embed banking into their own product and reap the benefits.
But how did we get here… €37M Series B in 2023, something that’s not so common anymore?
Making payments simple
I've been in payments and banking for 15 years, and I always felt like the industry was not well designed. It was unnecessarily complex. Long, convoluted sales processes, insane amounts of paperwork. Expensive. Slow. Since then, we’ve seen the SaaS revolution, we’ve seen iPhones… People CAN make complex things easy, with great design, with thoughtfulness. That’s what Swan is all about.
At Swan, we care about great product design in the payments and banking space and this is what motivates me every day. With my co-founders Nicolas and Mathieu, we launched Swan to make it genuinely easy for European entrepreneurs to add banking features to their core product. We built BaaS, SaaS-style! And we rethought every part of the process, from discovery to testing, to integration and launch. Everything should be super easy, fast, and reliable.
We wanted to productize Banking-as-a-Service
In 2019, we 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, we 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 our original vision of a truly easy Banking-as-a-Service platform has become a reality. The proof is in the pudding:
Swan already 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 our embedded banking platform for card issuing, localized banking accounts, automated SEPA transfers, and much more. We’ve processed over €7 billion for them so far, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- Up to now, we’ve allowed companies to do the basics like open accounts, issue cards, and do payments for their end-users. Next up, we’ll allow them to accept payments in all formats. We have launched SEPA Direct Debit already and are currently building card acquisition. This is the newest strategic direction we’re taking and was a significant request required by many customers, especially for companies innovating in more traditional sectors like real estate.
- All our 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. Established companies require comprehensive solutions. There’s just no getting around it.
- Swan is hyperlocalized. What does that mean? Imagine a Dutch app for HR, Proptech, Legaltech, whatever it may be... Their end-clients open an account for banking through Swan. They expect Dutch Terms and Conditions, following Dutch laws. Dutch Payment methods. Dutch support. They want their tax reporting to be done locally. And they want their IBANs (the account identifier) to start with “NL”. All the winning neobanks like Revolut and Qonto do this, and Swan makes it possible for any company to do the same. We did this for Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands and Italy are coming up next!
We are proud of what the team has accomplished in a short time
The embedded banking transformation is in its early stages. It’s estimated that 40% of all financial services will be delivered via embedded banking experiences. We still have a way to go for this to become reality. At Swan, our ambition is to be the driving engine of this revolution, backing our amazing partners who are building truly captivating user experiences!
Banks are not the future of banking - companies are.
Vamos! Weiter geht’s! On y va !
Nicolas Benady & the Swan team
