Enabling In-App SEPA Payments for French Fintech Unicorn Spendesk
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The client
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Spendesk is a French spend management platform, founded in 2016, that helps mid-market finance teams keep company spending under control. It calls itself a “7-in-1 spend management solution”, formalising approvals and budgets, corporate cards, invoice payments and expense reimbursements, plus reporting, compliance and the accounting automation behind all of it.
Valued at $1.5 billion as of January 2022, it is one of the more recent unicorns in the French fintech scene.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
Spendesk wanted to execute payments itself rather than lean on outside providers, which meant putting a payment system inside its own web app — and clearing a certification to do it.
Challenge 01SEPA, inside existing infrastructure
SEPA payments make cross-border euro transfers straightforward across 36 countries, but fitting them into banking infrastructure that already exists is another matter.
Challenge 02Certification with a French bank
Launching the MVP required certification with BPCE PS, which had to confirm the service ran in line with SEPA regulations and that communication with the bank stayed stable and accurate — with accounting entries cross-checked on both sides.
Challenge 03Complexity that has to not fail
A banking system for handling payments carries intricate internal logic, and eliminating the risk of defects or outages calls for a great deal of specialised testing.
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What we did
An internal banking system, built from concept to certification
Netguru supplied a self-sufficient team working in parallel with Spendesk’s own, which stayed on accounts, card handling and accounting while we took the payments engine.
SEPA payments in and out
Ongoing engineering on the internal banking system handling incoming and outgoing payments in line with SEPA regulation.
Watched inside the payments team
Quality assurance and monitoring sat within the Payments team rather than alongside it.
A testing strategy the bank would accept
A stable testing environment and a strategy matched to BPCE PS requirements, with the outcome of payment processing and the creation of accounting events verified throughout.
First BIC, first IBAN, first payments
Spendesk passed certification, acquired its first BIC and IBAN, deployed the updated code to production and cleared verification of that environment, then ran its first test payments in both directions.
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What’s next