💳 Backing Fintecture
Overlooked #128
Hi, it’s Alexandre from Eurazeo. I’m investing in seed & series A consumer and consumer enablers startups all over Europe. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and underrated consumer trends. Today, I’m delighted to share our investment into Fintecture’s series A.
With Nicolas, we’re thrilled to partner with Fintecture, investing into its €26m series A alongside with RTP, Target and Samaipata!
Fintecture is building the most comprehensive B2B checkout solution to help merchants generate additional sales, save time and reduce costs. It works with 7k+ merchants and 250k+ payers in 10 European countries including marquee customers such as Edenred, Up, Bricoman, Auchan or Decathlon. In 2022, Fintecture grew its TPV on average by 20% MoM.
B2B payments is an industry prone for disruption:
A large market: in 2018, B2B payments totalled $120tn and are expected to reach $200tn in 2028 (5x the size of B2C payments).
Mostly reliant on checks: in the US, 81% of businesses use paper checks to pay suppliers and 49% in the UK.
And manual processes: only 25% of invoices are filled and processed automatically in Europe and in the US.
Faysal (CEO), Anjan (CTO), Reda (CTO) and Tatiana (ex. COO) started Fintecture in 2017. They spent 2 years in R&D to create a robust payment infrastructure whose main initial differentiation was to support account-to-account (A2A) payments. Fintecture leveraged its A2A technology to sign large B2B merchants such as Edenred or Bricoman to help them process transaction from SMBs and to solve complex workflows around these transactions.
For instance, Auchan (top French retailer generating €32Bn in sales with 2k stores) uses Fintecture to modernise its after-sales service. Before Fintecture, Auchan processed reimbursements in-store. It had massive issues when card-based reimbursements did not work. In this case, Auchan had to use “lettre-cheque” which is a paper-based and manual process that costs €25 and that takes 4-5 days on average. With Fintecture, Auchan has switched its after-sales service online. You call Auchan’s customer success team or you make a request online. In 10 minutes, Auchan can process your request and the payment goes directly into your bank account. Fintecture has dramatically improved the experience for both Auchan’s afters-sales team and its customers. It has also brought great cost and time savings: €41k saved every month with cost to reimburse a customer divided by 25.
Another example I love is Bricoman (€730m in sales, 38 stores) which has been using Fintecture since Jun. 2022 online and in store to process payment via account to account payments. It’s working well as Fintecture is already processing 14% of transactions in-store and 5% online.
As a payment method, A2A has the following benefits: (i) more secure (authenticated by bank, leveraging existing KYC/AML/screening performed by the bank, no credit card numbers shared), (ii) lower cost, (iii) improved conversion rate when properly implemented, (iv) high reach (anyone with a bank account).
But A2A is a Trojan Horse to be integrated into the merchants’ payment stack. In parallel, Fintecture is building a complete B2B checkout solution that will not only process payments but that will also be integrated into many workflows driving significant cost savings for customers (e.g. automatic reconciliation, AR & AP management, reimbursements). It’s also an omni-channel solution supporting payments in e-commerce, offline in-store and in remote sales.
Fintecture will use the funding to grow its team from 80 to 120 people, to expand the capabilities of its B2B checkout platform and to expand in other European geographies such as the UK, Germany and Italy.
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋