How Finqle built a best-in-class pan-European payment infrastructure

To efficiently manage more than a million and growing payouts per year and serve their customers across continental Europe and the UK, Finqle had to build a pan-European payment infrastructure.

The challenges of pan-European payouts

To provide invoice factoring to its customers, Finqle operates two main payment flows:

• Payouts of purchased invoices to their customers

• Collection of invoice amounts from their customers’ customers

To automate these payments, Finqle built its own bank integration with the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. Not only did it allow Finqle to avoid manual tasks to payout their customers, but it also enabled them to automatically pull valuable information from their ABN AMRO bank account into their internal systems, including transactions from bank statements, payment statuses and prior-day and intra-day, account balances.

With this information, Finqle was able to calculate their cash position every 15min, a critical capability to be able to purchase the most invoices while immobilizing the least amount of liquidity at an acceptable risk level.

This initial setup worked well for Finqle’s first years of operations. But as the company, its offering and its customer base grow, Finqle is starting to face some challenges.

“We are very proud of the initial infrastructure we built that led us to today’s scale without major hiccups. But as we grow, expand our customer base and look to offer new services to our customers, we have to make choices and focus on the parts of our stack that are the most core to our business”, says Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle.

First, merchants now demand faster payouts of purchased invoices. Finqle’s integration with ABN AMRO only covered classic SEPA credit transfers, which usually take 1 working day to be processed, and itself introduced additional delays in the payment processing.

Finqle also wanted to support their customers in their pan-European growth, including in the UK, which required the support of the UK’s FasterPayments Service, or FPS. While ABN AMRO supported FPS payments via their UK branch, it required a new bank integration and an easy way to route payments through the right integration and originating accounts depending on the beneficiary.

Finqle wanted to add this new payment method while keeping a near real-time, unified view of their treasury and everything happening on their accounts. But this time, they didn’t want to divert resources from their core systems, their in-house invoice management and factoring system, to do so.

Building a sophisticated payment infrastructure while simplifying its management

Because of the strong relationship they created with ABN AMRO, Finqle didn’t want to switch banking partners but needed modern, easy connectivity on top of it.

“There is still a gap between banks’ core product offerings and how they enable their customers to access it. Challenger banks provide the API connectivity that enables agile fintechs like Finqle to consume their services easily. Still, we cannot expect the breadth of financial services Tier 1 banks offer from them. Tier 1 banks, on their side, are trusted and proven partners but are still lagging behind when it comes to connectivity. We were looking for the best of both worlds'' - Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle

They needed a solution that was as performant as their previous in-house integration, with the ability to support additional payment methods, new geographies, and Finqle’s growing payment volumes while maintaining complete visibility on their bank accounts.

Because of the time, resources and expertise it takes, they eliminated the option to build a new integration in-house.

To replace their existing ABN AMRO integration for SEPA credit transfer and add the support or FPS payments with ABN AMRO UK, automate the payment workflows across their multiple accounts, automate reconciliations and centralize their view on all transactions and treasury, Finqle chose Numeral.

In addition to the bank connectivity and ability to send and receive payments on various schemes, Finqle also benefits from Numeral’s automated reconciliations capabilities.

“With Numeral, we found more than a way to connect to our existing bank partner easily. The capabilities they built on top of their multiple bank integrations make Numeral a complete solution for pan-European payments'' - Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle.

Ready to support new countries, and new payments, instantly

Choosing Numeral as its bank orchestration solution, Finqle was able to access UK’s FPS payments through ABN AMRO in a matter of days instead of months. As Finqle systems are now connected to Numeral, Finqle can now add a new bank and new payment methods in the EU and the UK by simply changing a line of code, enabling them to address customers in new geographies instantly from a payments perspective.

Numeral’s automated reconciliations and payment automation capabilities enable Finqle to scale with confidence and manage a growing number of customers and associated payment volumes efficiently.

Finally, Finqle can now easily access all its bank accounts and associated information via API and webhooks. This enables it to ingest this data into its systems in real-time, giving a real-time view of its treasury.

Looking further, Finqle plan to support SEPA instant payments to offer instant payouts for their European customers.

“Numeral removes the payments parameter from the equation when it comes to our geographic expansion: we know we will be able to send payouts to our merchants and collect repayments anywhere we want to go in Europe. With their unique API and dashboard, we know that we will keep complete control and visibility on our payments no matter how many payment methods we support and banks we work with.” - Erik-Jan Klinkenberg, Founder and CEO at Finqle.