Saving 120 days per year on Hexeko’s payment operations

Hexeko is an innovative employee benefits company providing companies and their employees with multi-benefit vouchers, including meals, mobility, sports and culture. Acquired by Up Group in 2021 to digitalise the group offers and operate them on the French market, Hexeko provides cards used daily by more than 155,000 employees.

Making money available to employees as fast as possible

What Hexeko sells to companies is value-added money that comes with specific benefits and tax exemptions. Once Hexeko customers fund their accounts, this money must be available to companies employees as fast as possible. Employees can use this money via cards issued by Stripe.

To run their services, Hexeko operates two main payment flows:

• Incoming payments: Hexeko collects funds via direct debit or bank transfers made by its customers

• Outgoing payments: Hexeko makes the funds available to employees on their cards by making payments to Hexeko’s Stripe accounts.

Today, these flows represent dozens of millions of euros processed per year. They are at the core of the value Hexeko delivers to its customers.

To support the growth of Hexeko’s and Group Up's activities, including the digitalisation of Group Up's paper voucher-based activity, Hexeko needed to make this core workflow and the infrastructure supporting it more robust.

Automating core payment flows for Hexeko’s next stages of growth

Before Numeral, Hexeko was managing the incoming bank transfers manually. Hexeko’s teams had to control incoming payments in their web banking manually and mark effectively received payments as paid in a back office.

This process was too time-consuming and error-prone for Hexeko’s next stages of growth. They sought a solution to automate this payment flow, including its intricacies.

“Funding our Stripe accounts isn’t as simple as transferring exactly the funds our customers sent us. We deduct VAT and fees from our customer payments. We have specific treasury management requirements, including depositing funds corresponding to meal vouchers on a specific meal voucher account at our partner bank before sending them to our Stripe accounts. We needed a solution to automate and accelerate all these workflows at scale.” - Guillaume Dasnoy, CFO at Hexeko.

Optimising payments on top of existing systems and processes

When looking for a solution, Hexeko evaluated various treasury management systems. None met their automation needs.

Hexeko also evaluated open banking solutions to collect payments, but the required strong authentication required from customers would have introduced too much friction and negatively impacted user experience.

The Hexeko team decided to implement Numeral to solve their automation needs while keeping their current bank BNP Paribas and providing a frictionless customer experience.

Numeral is connected to Hexeko’s BNP Paribas accounts in France and Belgium. On Hexeko’s side, Hexeko internal systems directly integrate with Numeral via API. Numeral is connected to Stripe and many other solutions through these internal systems. “For instance, we can automatically trigger a payment via Numeral when receiving a Stripe webhook”, shares Guillaume.

“The implementation of Numeral has been straightforward, requiring only part of one developer’s three-week sprint. Before we could allocate our developer to the implementation, we’ve been able to start automating most of our workflows by importing CSV files through the Numeral dashboard,” says Guillaume.

Saving 120 days per year on payment operations

At current volumes, manually reconciling incoming payments and sending them took Hexeko’s team 10 days per month. This work was concentrated around the end and beginning of the month when companies were topping up their accounts for their employees.

“Even without considering our planned growth, the situation was already critical. The Hexeko team member in charge of these payments had no time left for their treasury tasks, and we had to hire contractors to support us in the peak weeks. We couldn’t have managed our upcoming growth without Numeral,” says Guillaume.

Automating the workflows with Numeral, Hexeko also reduced payment and reconciliation errors.

Looking ahead: optimising direct debits and building new payment products

In addition to bank payments sent by its customers, Hexeko also collects part of its customer payments via direct debits. Next on Hexeko’s payments roadmap is to leverage BNP Paribas through its Numeral integration for direct debits, currently managed via Stripe.

“Direct debits were not on our initial scope with Numeral. But when we realised that we could automate our BNP Paribas direct debit via Numeral, we decided to leverage this setup. It will enable us to collect direct debits directly on our bank accounts, saving three days on each direct debit compared to our setup with Stripe.” says Guillaume.

After direct debits, Hexeko plans to enable companies to automatically reimburse benefits paid by employees themselves. These payments to employees’ personal bank accounts will be processed via Numeral.

Hexeko has ambitious growth plans for the upcoming years. By the end of 2024, they aim at 300,000 employees benefiting from its services and 8x the value of money issued with their Hexeko cards compared to 2023.

To develop the platform that will support that growth and add new capabilities to Hexeko’s products, they are hiring engineers in various areas, from payments to back-end to data.