Meet Fintecture, a French startup that wants to upgrade B2B payments. While many payment companies have focused on B2C payments with Stripe leading the way, B2B payments haven’t changed much over the years.
“In the U.S., there are still a lot of paper checks. In Europe, it’s mostly transfers and manual reconciliation,” Fintecture co-founder and CEO Faysal Oudmine told me.
But this underinvestment in the B2B market is weird as those transactions represent a much larger volume than B2C transactions. That’s because the average B2B transaction is much larger — we are talking about tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In order to provide a product that works better, Fintecture is approaching the market in different ways. There’s no single solution that is going to work for all companies.
With its first payment method, Fintecture relies on open banking. The company has signed partnerships with big corporate clients, such as Edenred or Bricoman, so that these companies’ own clients pay them using Fintecture.
When they click on a Fintecture link (or scan a QR code in store), they can then connect to their bank account and confirm the transaction from there. The first transaction requires a bit of onboarding, but it’s already easier with the second transaction.
200,000 companies have interacted Fintecture at some point to pay for products or services. They either initiate an instant payment or a normal transfer with an instant confirmation. Fintecture guarantees that the money will arrive on the big company’s bank account eventually.
Fintecture created a second method so that customers can pay from their banking interface. Essentially, the startup generates virtual IBANs so that it can automatically reconcile incoming payments.
“The payer receives a tracking link that works like a DHL link so that they know what’s the status of their money in the payment flow,” Oudmine said.
Fintecture’s third product is a way to let your customers pay in multiple installments. Fintecture takes care of fraud and payment processing so that you don’t have to use a BNPL provider. Instead, companies can unlock a credit line with their banker directly knowing that the money will arrive eventually. It’s usually much cheaper than borrowing money from a BNPL company.
Finally, Fintecture can also handles refunds. “Here we have a solution that automates part of the reimbursements with integrated KYC and AML features as well as instant payments,” Oudmine said. Fintecture asks companies to connect to their bank accounts to check their identity directly.
Overall, 7,000 businesses collect payments using Fintecture. Around a thousand of them use the product directly while the rest relies on integrations in Pennylane, Libeo, Regate and other fintech products.
Fintecture raised a $26 million Series A funding round (€26 million) this year. Investors include Target Global, Eurazeo, RTP Global, Samaipata, Allianz Trade, Société Générale and various business angels. There are currently 80 people working for the startup — and the company plans to hire another 40 employees.
Fintecture wants to replace paper checks or manual transfers for B2B payments by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
