• Dozens of partners are now using Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service platform since its 2020 launch, including Agicap, Alma, Expensya, Fintecture, Mon Bel Appart, Pennylane, and Ride
• Expansion into Germany underway as first partner announced and local office opening set for early 2022
• Self-service offering available by end of year, so anyone can get up and running in minutes

Paris, September 28th, 2021: Swan, the easiest way for companies to embed banking features into their products, today announces its €16 million Series A led by Accel. Existing investors, Creandum, who led the seed round in 2020, and Bpifrance, also participated in the round.

The investment will allow Swan to accelerate its European expansion by enhancing the platform's functionality with market-specific features and a self-service offering, as well as grow its sales, marketing, and finance teams. The fintech plans to open its German office in early 2022 and today announces its first German customer: Ride.

Embedded finance brings opportunity to tech products of all kinds

Tech companies, both consumer and B2B, face increasing competitive pressure to offer simple, integrated, multi-product experiences. The pandemic only increased this digital competition, making the acquisition of customers harder and more expensive. A crucial way to compete is by embedding financial services within existing products. Embedded finance lets companies smooth out clunky money movement processes, so users no longer have to bounce back and forth between multiple apps just to pay for things or get paid. It's transformational for the user experience, leading to a strong uplift in retention as well as new revenue sources.

However, for most, deploying full-service embedded finance products remains costly, time-consuming, and fraught with regulatory issues. This is where Swan comes in.

Swan: the quickest, easiest way to embed finance features

Swan helps SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and fintech startups to rapidly deploy secure and simple embedded finance products. Taking a developer-friendly approach, Swan helps companies integrate white-labeled banking features like accounts, cards, and IBANs into existing workflows and UX via APIs.

Companies that connect with Swan's full-service and turnkey BaaS platform take minimal regulatory risk, as they get to piggyback on its e-money license (regulated by France’s ACPR), passported across the European Economic Area. Security and regulatory requirements such as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) as part of PSD2, identity verification, and fraud detection, are also met by Swan as part of its platform. This allows companies to offer fintech features while still maintaining focus on developing their core products.

Swan, founded in Paris in 2019 by Nicolas Benady (CEO), Mathieu Breton (CTO), and Nicolas Saison (COO), in collaboration with startup studio eFounders, launched its Banking-as-a-Service platform in 2020 and will become self-service this autumn. This will enable developers to begin testing in the company's sandbox environment in just seconds, directly via the Swan website; no need for a tedious sales and onboarding process to get started. This shift represents Swan's next move on its mission to democratize access to banking services across Europe.

Nicolas Benady, Swan CEO, said:

EU companies of all sizes and backgrounds already use Swan's super-simple APIs to put fintech into their products. It's exciting to witness how quickly they're seeing success. But financial particularities vary from country to country. Our ambition for this funding round is to provide banking features with local flavor, specialized for a multitude of local EU markets: Ideal in the Netherlands, Ibans starting with DE in Germany, Capital deposits accounts in France, and much more! We are thrilled to have Accel, one of the top VCs in the world, onboard for this journey. Their fabulous global platform and fintech expertise will prove invaluable as we scale across Europe.

Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel, said:

"By enabling non-fintech businesses to embed finance products into their offerings via off-the-shelf, developer-friendly APIs, the Swan team is ensuring companies can significantly improve their customer experience and augment their offering. We’ve been impressed with the momentum the company has had since it launched earlier this year and believe the business opportunities Swan can offer its customers in the future are endless. We’re looking forward to supporting the team on the next phase of their journey!"