Swan (HX19) raises €16 million Series A to democratize access to banking services

Just one year after raising a seed round, Swan (eF19), the Banking-as-a-Service platform today announces its Series A of €16 million led by Accel. With dozens of clients already on board, Swan now plans to accelerate European expansion.

The easiest way to embed banking features

Swan was born in 2019 in our studio when we decided to partner with Nico Benady, Nicolas Saison, and Mathieu Breton to find a better way to embed banking features into products. Two rounds of financing later and the team has achieved this and so much more.

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. With Swan companies can become a fintech. And all of this with taking only minimal regulatory risk, Swan has an e-money license (regulated by France’s ACPR), passported across the European Economic Area. So companies can offer fintech features while still maintaining focus on developing their core products.

Why you should add banking features to your product

With Swan, non-fintech businesses can embed finance into its product and move into a new dimension. In today’s increasingly competitive software landscape, adding banking features to a product helps differentiate it from other existing software, improves the user experience, and leads to increased retention and more revenue sources.

Take the example of Pennylane who recently became a client of Swan. Pennylane is a fast-growing accounting software for SMBs. Before Swan, when paying an invoice, Pennylane’s clients had to leave the Pennylane platform to confirm payment in their external banking app. Now, Swan’s BaaS platform has linked accounting to banking services, meaning that clients no longer have to constantly bounce back and forth between their banking app and accounting solution. They can execute and automate payments directly from Pennylane — improving the user experience drastically.

And Swan isn’t just stopping with Pennylane. Its elegant and powerful API has won over dozens of other partners including Agicap, Alma, Expensya, Fintecture, Mon Bel Appart, and Ride. We’re incredibly proud of everything the team has achieved over the past two years!

What’s next for Swan

The round of funding will enable Swan to accelerate its European expansion. Swan wants to provide banking features with local flavor, specialized for a multitude of local EU markets and is already planning to open its German office in early 2022. The funding will also the company to grow its sales, marketing, and finance teams. So if you’re passionate about fintech and want to make banking easy for everyone, then go on and apply!

Finally, the team at Swan is also (not so) secretly scheming to abolish the plastic bank card once and for all and go full-digital 😉 Count us in Swan, we’re in.