How Finqle built a best-in-class pan-European payment infrastructure
To efficiently manage more than a million and growing payouts per year and better serve their customers, Finqle built a pan-European payment infrastructure.
- payments per year
- automated payment approval and execution
- engineering time to add a new bank
FINQLE
About the customer
Finqle is an innovative invoicing- and factoring-as-a-service company based in Amsterdam and rapidly growing throughout Europe and the UK.
With their advanced technology and services, Finqle creates an optimised invoicing and payment alignment between debtor, intermediary and merchant, making the whole process from invoicing to payments simple, efficient, and transparent.
- Founded in 2015
- Located in Amsterdam, Netherlands
The challenge
The challenges of pan-European payouts
To provide invoice factoring to its customers, Finqle operates two main payment flows:
- Payouts of purchased invoices to their customers
- Collection of invoice amounts from their customers’ customers
To automate these payments, Finqle built its own bank integration with the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. Not only did it allow Finqle to avoid manual tasks to payout their customers, but it also enabled them to automatically pull valuable information from their ABN AMRO bank account into their internal systems, including transactions from bank statements, payment statuses and prior-day and intra-day, account balances.
With this information, Finqle was able to calculate their cash position every 15 minutes, a critical capability to be able to purchase the most invoices while immobilising the least amount of liquidity at an acceptable risk level.
This initial setup worked well for Finqle’s first years of operations. But as the company, its offering and its customer base grow, Finqle is starting to face some challenges.
First, merchants now demand faster payouts of purchased invoices. Finqle’s integration with ABN AMRO only covered classic SEPA credit transfers, which usually take 1 working day to be processed, and itself introduced additional delays in the payment processing.
Finqle also wanted to support their customers in their pan-European growth, including in the UK, which required the support of the UK’s FasterPayments Service, or FPS. While ABN AMRO supported FPS payments via their UK branch, it required a new bank integration and an easy way to route payments through the right integration and originating accounts depending on the beneficiary.
Finqle wanted to add this new payment method while keeping a near real-time, unified view of their treasury and everything happening on their accounts. But this time, they didn’t want to divert resources from their core systems, their in-house invoice management and factoring system, to do so.
The solution
A sophisticated payment infrastructure with simplified management
They needed a solution that was as performant as their previous in-house integration, with the ability to support additional payment methods, new geographies, and Finqle’s growing payment volumes while maintaining complete visibility on their bank accounts. Because of the time, resources and expertise it takes, they eliminated the option to build a new integration in-house.
To replace their existing ABN AMRO integration for SEPA credit transfer and add the support or FPS payments with ABN AMRO UK, automate the payment workflows across their multiple accounts, automate reconciliations and centralize their view on all transactions and treasury, Finqle chose Mambu Payments.
In addition to the bank connectivity and ability to send and receive payments on various schemes, Finqle also benefits from Mambu Payments’ automated reconciliations capabilities.
“With Mambu Payments, we found more than a way to connect to our existing bank partner easily. The capabilities they built on top of their multiple bank integrations make Mambu Payments a complete solution for pan-European payments.”
- Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle
The result
Ready to support new countries and payments, instantly
Choosing Mambu Payments as its bank orchestration solution, Finqle was able to access UK’s FPS payments through ABN AMRO in a matter of days instead of months. As Finqle systems are now connected to Mambu Payments, Finqle can now add a new bank and new payment methods in the EU and the UK by simply changing a line of code, enabling them to address customers in new geographies instantly from a payments perspective.
Mambu Payments' automated reconciliations and payment automation capabilities enable Finqle to scale with confidence and manage a growing number of customers and associated payment volumes efficiently.
Finally, Finqle can now easily access all its bank accounts and associated information via API and webhooks. This enables it to ingest this data into its systems in real-time, giving a real-time view of its treasury. Looking ahead, Finqle plans to support SEPA instant payments to offer instant payouts for their European customers.
“Mambu Payments removes the payments parameter from the equation when it comes to our geographic expansion: we know we will be able to send payouts to our merchants and collect repayments anywhere we want to go in Europe. With their unique API and dashboard, we know that we will keep complete control and visibility on our payments no matter how many payment methods we support and banks we work with.”
- Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle
About Mambu Payments
Mambu Payments is a modern payments hub with native straight-through processing, orchestration, liquidity, and reconciliation. It delivers real-time, compliant payment flows into any core system. With managed connectivity to local and global schemes and composable payment workflows, financial institutions can launch faster, reduce costs and stay compliant at scale.
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