Launched in 2021, Defacto is the first ACPR-licensed B2B lending platform in Europe to offer real-time credit decisions.

Built to solve the structural cash flow gap facing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Defacto provides on-demand working capital financing without paperwork or operational friction.

Defacto offers a versatile product suite, including receivable financing, flex financing, payable financing, and a 100% virtual business credit card, operating directly via getdefacto.com, embedded fintech partnerships (such as Pennylane and Qonto), and white-label Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) platforms for major financial institutions across France, Germany, and Spain.

Defacto had built a credit engine capable of making real-time lending decisions, but embedding financing within a major financial institution required the payment infrastructure to also match that speed.

For its receivable financing proposition with a leading French financial institution, Defacto needed reliable SEPA connectivity that could integrate with its existing infrastructure, scale and meet the strict requirements of a regulated financial institution.

The Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers Defacto benchmarked required it to open new accounts with their custodian banks, adding operational complexity and counterparty considerations. Building direct bank connectivity itself would mean taking on another significant technical and operational burden.

Defacto selected Mambu Payments to provide the payment layer connecting its credit engine with its institutional banking partner. Instead of forcing Defacto to rebuild its banking setup around a third party, Mambu Payments allowed Defacto to maintain its existing account setup while fully automating SEPA payment operations through a modern REST API.

Mambu Payments handles the underlying transaction flows that power Defacto's embedded receivable financing product. By replacing the need to build a custom bank connectivity layer, Mambu Payments offloaded the technical overhead of generating XML files, running SFTP servers, and parsing complex message formats such as pain.001, pain.008, and CAMT.053.

The project brought together product, engineering, legal, compliance, and risk teams at Defacto, working in close collaboration with teams from ts banking partner and Mambu. Initial product scoping began in July 2025, leading to a live beta pre-launch in late November 2025, a delivery timeframe of approximately five months.

Once the core infrastructure foundations were established via Mambu Payments, Defacto's engineering team brought the embedded product from zero to production in a matter of weeks. Following the beta rollout, the solution reached commercial launch at scale in January 2026, allowing the banks’ clients to access instant financing against their invoices directly within their existing factoring environment.

Deploying Mambu Payments reduced Defacto's operational burden, shrinking ongoing technical costs to standard integration maintenance and payment flow management. It now has real-time visibility across payment flows, disbursements and repayments, giving its teams greater operational control over the integration.

Having proved that embedded SME credit works at production scale with a tier-1 financial institution, Defacto is extending the same Mambu Payments architecture to a second tier-1 institutional partner.

This reusable embedded-financing framework allows financial institutions across Europe to plug directly into Defacto’s lending engine without requiring a re-architecture of the payment layer, accelerating Defacto's mission to make SME credit instant, invisible, and accessible.