How Swile unlocked innovation with a future-proof payment infrastructure

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Swile is a worktech company that created the first employee super app that 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

Swile defines payments as all the systems and processes that enable to move money and allow the relevant parties to understand how this money is moved, from companies to end users through internal auditors and regulators.

“Given Swile’s mission, payments are its backbone and most critical strategic infrastructure. Payments are what make or break our P&L,” says Quentin. As part of its activities, meal, gift and mobility vouchers and corporate travel booking, Swile operates three main payment flows:

• Collecting funds from companies to credit their Swile accounts through credit transfer or direct debits

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

• Collecting fees from affiliate restaurants with direct debits

Swile launched using the services of a BaaS provider for card issuing, account holding, and payments.

As part of its growth, Swile acquired its 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 their own IBANs to their customers. With their own IBANs, Swile gets more control over their payments, facilitates payment attribution, and increases customer trust.

To answer its needs, Swile decided to become a SEPA indirect participant, but 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.

This decision to work with a partner to handle this technical complexity was driven by the will to keep Swile’s payment product and engineering resources focused on card issuing, which is more core to Swile’s business.

Swile’s main criteria when evaluating a solution to integrate with their partner bank were the quality of the API, the simplicity of integration, and the quality and granularity of data made available.

Such data include bank account transactions and balances, payments received or initiated, and real-time payment statuses.

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 their core banking system and integrated with their sponsor bank in 3 weeks instead of 6 to 9 months for direct bank integration.

A future-proof infrastructure supporting Swile's growth

With Mambu Payments, Swile saved significant time and resources on their SEPA indirect participant project. As a fully managed payments infrastructure, Mambu Payments also protects Swile from future SEPA scheme updates introducing breaking changes.

This allows Swile to keep focusing its product and engineering resources on core products that will fuel Swile’s growth.

Significantly reducing the cost of automation

Having multiple bank accounts connected to Mambu Payments enables Swile to automate more and more processes linked to their payment operations. Leveraging the Mambu Payments API, Swile can trigger treasury movements based on specific events, unlocking powerful scenarios.

Swile started by automating its safeguarding workflows, previously done manually by the finance team. Doing so saved them significant time every day.

Automating these tasks also removes room for errors and allows for accurately tracking all movements. It makes Swile’s payments more resilient.

Finally, it has also benefited Swile’s finance organisation itself. Automating most tasks allows Swile to keep a lean finance organisation with all team members working on high-value tasks. This leaner organisation allows for easier communication and collaboration with other teams.

Looking forward: end-to-end optimisation of direct debits

Moving forward, Swile’s payments team is looking to leverage Mambu Payments to automate even more payment flows to support their growth. The next significant project is to increase affiliates' direct debit success rate.

As of today, 43% of Swile’s initiated direct debit failures are due to incorrect or outdated affiliate bank account information, such as incorrect account numbers or lack of support for direct debits by the affiliate's bank.

Swile is looking to leverage Mambu Payments’ upcoming counterparty accounts information verification capabilities to reduce direct debit failures related to these causes significantly.

By generating and managing direct debit mandates in Mambu Payments, Swile could prevent a further 12% of direct debit failures due to direct debit mandates-related errors.

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 rejected for this reason at a better time in the month to increase direct debit success probability.