Sibill: Turning customer requests into actual growth

Sibill is an Italian platform that simplifies financial and administrative management for over 4,000 SMBs. The platform is accredited with the Italian Tax Agency (Agenzia delle Entrate) for e-invoice transmission and integrates with all Italian banks through PSD2, the European directive for secure banking data integration.

Their impact in numbers includes:

• 5 million reconciled transactions
• 100 million euros in payments made
• 9+ million invoices issued

Italy has mandated e-invoicing for years, which created the perfect environment for a shared, standardized format that all entrepreneurs use⁠⁠. This creates a naturally centralized system where all invoices are already well-organized in one tool, so adding payments is the next logical step.

They offer collaboration features that allow businesses to work seamlessly with their accountants by sharing documents and first entries securely. By allowing businesses to share these first entries securely with their accountants, Sibill enables collaboration on the early stages of financial record-keeping, making it easier for accountants to review, adjust, and finalize the accounting records without requiring multiple back-and-forth exchanges. Their core strength is organizing the inflow side of money: e-invoicing, deadlines, and cash visibility in one place.

But customers were still paying the highest cost of their workflows: time.

The challenge

SMBs were wasting a lot of time exporting CSVs, jumping between an e‑invoicing tool, Excel, and traditional banking platforms. Their time was spent on low‑value admin instead of running the business.

There was a clear fragmented workflow problem that created significant friction in their daily operations.

Entrepreneurs are also acutely aware they are spending too much time on low-to-zero-value activities instead of high-value work like understanding business performance, optimizing working capital, or negotiating better payment terms with suppliers.

Before embedded banking, customers manually uploaded transactions for real-time visibility and exported CSVs to Excel for bulk payments, which was always a time-consuming, multi-tool process.

The experience fell short of SMBs' expectations for modern financial tools. They wanted integrated software, but the market wasn't delivering it.

These pain points drove customer demand for the integrated solution Sibill built with Swan.

What they built

Their end users wanted one place to manage invoices and execute payments, eliminating the need to jump between e-invoicing tools, Excel, and traditional banking platforms, and Sibill built exactly that by launching business accounts and cards.

Their embedded banking solution replaced a fragmented three-tool workflow with a single, modern platform. This directly addresses the core frustration they faced with their previously disconnected, time-consuming workflow.

“Consider before on the platform they had to basically upload the transaction in order to be able to see that in real time. So, having the cards connected with the account is giving them real-time visibility on what is happening.” — Benedetta Ludovisi, Product Manager at Sibill

With embedded banking, Sibill users can now:

• Execute payments directly from the platform without switching tools
• Select multiple invoices and process bulk payments in one place
• Eliminate CSV exports and Excel file management
• Get immediate transaction visibility through connected cards
• Remove the need for manual tasks, like transaction uploads

What they achieved

The market response validated the bet immediately. Sibill forecast opening around 50 new accounts during the launch. However, in the first week after the September 16 go‑live, they recorded 245, around five times the plan. By October 28, onboardings reached 1,021, a 4× month‑over‑month jump. More important than the volume, though, is who these users are and how they behave.

Beyond raw volume, user behavior points to quality. Customers who do their core jobs using Sibill, such as executing payments, are estimated to churn at one‑fourth of the rate compared to Sibill’s overall customer base, according to Mattia Montepara, co-founder and CEO at Sibill.

That’s a strong sign that integrated payments aren’t a must-have feature; they’re a core job‑to‑be‑done that deepens product fit. Card adoption among account users is high as well, setting up the next chapter in expense management and connected spend.

Consumer-driven expansion

Listening to end users became the catalyst for expansion for Sibill. They extended from invoicing to integrated payments by partnering with Swan.

The outcome is an all‑in‑one experience: the same workspace that shows what’s due is now the place where payments get executed. This wasn’t a top‑down feature add. It was consumer‑driven expansion aimed at removing work and giving time back.

“For us it was not just an initiative from Sibill, but it was one of the key requests from our customer base. It was like this because they wanted to have one unique, integrated place where to manage their payments. So, one place where they could manage both invoices and and payment deadlines, and at the other at the same time also to close the gap end-to-end and and complete also the payment.” —  Mattia Montepara, co-founder & CEO at Sibill

With embedded banking, the experience Sibill offers end users finally aligns with Italian SMBs' expectations: an all-in-one tool.

The customers executing payments on Sibill's platform are decision makers performing essential business tasks, core jobs that define how their companies run. These high-quality users stay longer, churn less, and drive stronger retention because the product has become indispensable to their daily operations.

“Customers doing payments on our platform are customers of extremely high quality compared to the others. We identified these kinds of customers as customers executing core jobs with us. Those customers, we observe, have churn rates that are a fourth of the rate we see on the overall customer base who are not doing those core activities on Sibill. In the long term, we expect this, and especially executing payments on the platform, to be a key element and key service to attract very high quality customers.” — Mattia Montepara, co-founder & CEO at Sibill

Time as currency

The product philosophy is consistent: Sibill treats time as currency. Every new capability must return minutes, not add steps.

Looking ahead, Sibill’s roadmap keeps the “time as currency” guardrail. Two expansions are already in view for the Italian market:

• Tax payment modules that turn forms into one‑click remittance, removing back‑and‑forth with external portals. They’re essential for Italian companies to pay taxes, which will offer a unique payment experience that isn’t widely offered in the market.
• Expense and spend management features for managing the entire invoicing journey, from automatic receipt categorization and instant visibility to expense claims and reimbursement requests, leveraging the accounts-plus-cards foundation.

Their thought process is set; if a new capability doesn’t remove steps or shorten cycles, it doesn’t ship.

“Out of the customer that activate their account, the majority of them are activating and using cards, and this is also why we're looking also at expanding the road map with expense management, because it's a really important feature for them [Sibill’s users].” — Benedetta Ludovisi, Product Manager, Sibill

Italy's regulatory context amplifies Sibill's approach. E-invoicing is mandated and standardized, so invoice data is centralized and structured by default. That structure makes integrated payment execution the natural next step.

Entrepreneurs and SMBs know the value of time, and they want to minimize low-value activities and maximize time spent on high-value decisions.

This gap in execution fuels Sibill's expansion decisions. They observed that even when regulatory intentions were good (as with open banking), execution often fell short. Sibill chose complete execution from the start so entrepreneurs can reclaim hours previously lost to fragmented tools and disjointed processes.

About the partnership

When Sibill began looking for a partner, speed mattered most. They needed someone who could move from conversation to launch quickly, but carefully. In those early April and May calls with Swan, they found what they were looking for; a team that promised fast execution and then delivered on it. By September 16, less than five months later, Sibill had gone live without sacrificing trust or quality along the way.

“When we had the first initial conversation with Swan, we had a feeling of a potential partner with a strong speed of execution on their side. Luckily this was actually the case when we put our hands at work to make everything work properly, since we started in April/May.” — Mattia Montepara, co-founder & CEO, Sibill

Swan delivered on the early signals from the sales process. The modularity, white-label flexibility, and clear ownership of KYC (Know Your Customer) and ongoing AML (Anti-Money Laundering) promised during those first conversations held true throughout the build. KYC verifies customer identity to prevent fraud and ensure compliance. AML refers to ongoing monitoring and controls that detect and prevent illegal financial activities like money laundering.

“Regarding the partnership, I think one really, really big piece of the reason why we went fast is also the modularity of the product. So, we can have some parts of the product that we can just use white label, and then build other things. This kind of thing is not a service that you can find a lot, and it makes us go to market much quicker.” — Benedetta Ludovisi, Product Manager, Sibill

For Sibill’s users, fewer compliance back‑and‑forths meant fewer hours lost before value was live. In their day-to-day work, the impact is tangible.

Three tools that used to live in silos (e-invoicing software, Excel files, and home banking) now flow together seamlessly. Because accounts and cards are connected, transactions appear in real time and manual uploads become a thing of the past.

The takeaway

Sibill's story is ultimately straightforward, yet precise in its execution. Their customers clearly articulated what they needed on the product roadmap, and Sibill responded by building the comprehensive, end‑to‑end execution capabilities that their users had specifically requested.

The tangible payoff from this customer-driven approach manifests itself in multiple dimensions: minutes of valuable time saved for busy entrepreneurs, business workflows that have been dramatically simplified and streamlined, and measurable traction that validates the product-market fit they've achieved.

About Sibill

Founded in 2021 by Mattia Montepara, Lorenzo Liguori and Dario Prencipe, Sibill is an Italian fintech company specializing in SaaS solutions that simplify the financial, administrative and accounting management of small and medium-sized businesses and accounting firms. Simple and intuitive to use, the platform enables users to manage invoices, deadlines, payments and cash flows from a single access point, helping them save time and work with greater efficiency and control. Headquartered in Milan and supported by a team of over 100 people, the company has already earned the trust of 4,000 businesses and raised more than €18.7 million from leading investors. Visit www.sibill.com.