Swile is a worktech company that created the first employee super app. The app provides a unified, personalised and modern experience that enhances engagement at work.

The company has 5.5 millions users and 85,000 corporate clients, including Carrefour, Le Monde, PSG, Airbnb, Spotify, Red Bull, and TikTok.

• Founded in 2018

• Operating in France and Brazil

• 65+ NPS

For Swile, payments encompass all the systems and processes that enable money to be transferred, from companies to end-users through internal auditors and regulators, and are considered the backbone of its business. As part of its extensive activities, including meal, gift and mobility vouchers and corporate travel booking, Swile operates three main payment flows:

• Collecting funds from companies via credit transfers or direct debits to credit their Swile acccounts.

• Enabling employees to pay for meals, gifts and mobility with Swile cards.

• Collecting fees from affiliate restaurants with direct debits.

Swile initially launched using a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider for card issuing, account holding, and payments. As the company grew, it acquired its own electronic money institution licence and decided to internalise capabilities previously provided by its BaaS provider for increased product flexibility and better unit economics.

A significant driver for Swile was the ability to offer accounts with its own IBANs to its customers. With its own IBANs, Swile gains more control over its payments, facilitates payment attribution, and increases customer trust.

To meet its needs, Swile decided to become a SEPA indirect participant. However, the company didn’t want to bear the technical complexity of integrating directly with their sponsor bank and building the systems to operate as a SEPA indirect participant.

Swile decided to work with a partner capable of handling this technical complexity so its payment product and engineering resources could remain focused on card issuing, which is more central to its business. The company's primary criteria for evaluating a solution were the quality of the API, the simplicity of integration, and the quality and granularity of data made available.

Based on Mambu Payments’ API and documentation and the previous successful collaborations between Mambu Payments and Swile’s sponsor bank, BPCE, Swile selected Mambu Payments as their payment infrastructure. Swile integrated the Mambu Payments API into its core banking system and integrated with its sponsor bank within three weeks, a significant reduction from the six to nine months typically required for a direct bank integration.

With Mambu Payments, Swile saved significant time and resources on its SEPA indirect participant project.

As a fully managed payments infrastructure, Mambu Payments also protects Swile from future SEPA scheme updates, enabling the company to focus its product and engineering resources on core products that will drive its growth.

By having multiple bank accounts connected to Mambu Payments, Swile can automate an increasing number of processes related to its payment operations. It started by automating safeguarding workflows, which were previously done manually by the finance team, saving them significant time and costs every day.

Automating these tasks also eliminates the potential for errors and enables the accurate tracking of all movements, making Swile’s payments more resilient.

This has also benefited Swile’s finance organisation itself, allowing it to remain lean and focus on high-value tasks.

Looking ahead, Swile seeks to leverage Mambu Payments’ upcoming counterparty accounts information verification capabilities to reduce direct debit failures with its next project.

Currently, 43% of Swile’s initiated direct debit failures are due to incorrect or outdated bank account information for affiliates. By generating and managing direct debit mandates in Mambu Payments, Swile can prevent an additional 12% of direct debit failures.

Finally, 15% of direct debit failures are due to a lack of funds in the affiliate’s account. By implementing Mambu Payments’ automated retry capability, Swile will be able to automatically retry direct debits to increase success probability.