How Spendesk cut payment costs by 10 times with Mambu

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Spendesk is a complete spend management platform that gives finance teams 100% visibility and control over company spending.

Trusted by more than 5,000 finance teams, Spendesk replaces complicated and bureaucratic money management with a single solution that lets customers manage spending from start to finish, including procurement and multi-currency payments to corporate cards, expense reimbursements, and pre-accounting.

By increasing productivity and collaboration, the platform frees up valuable time for finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

• Founded in 2016

• 200,000+ users in France, the UK, Germany and Spain

Moving funds is central to Spendesk’s business.

As such, the company manages three main payment flows: collecting funds to credit customer accounts, initiating payments to pay customer invoices, and processing payments to reimburse company expenses.

Spendesk initially launched its operations using a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider, enabling it to enter the market quickly. However, as the company scaled, it encountered limitations that slowed its operations, restricted its product, and negatively impacted the customer experience.

As a BaaS customer, Spendesk didn’t have its own BICs and IBANs. When a transfer was sent or received by its customers, they would see the name of their provider, causing confusion.

Reliance on a third-party provider also limited product innovation, preventing Spendesk from offering key features such as instant SEPA payments and Apple Pay support. Operational teams also faced frequent instabilities and outages that, at times, prevented customers from making bank payments for extended periods.

The greatest challenge for Spendesk, however, was its strategic dependence on its BaaS provider. The provider’s generic compliance rules and KYC requirements created significant friction, delaying customer onboarding and even preventing Spendesk from serving certain companies. To overcome these limitations, Spendesk decided to obtain its own payment institution license and integrate a more significant part of the value chain into its operations. It chose the SEPA indirect participant model to do so.

Becoming a SEPA indirect participant means connecting to SEPA CSMs through a sponsor bank. After evaluating several banks in France and Europe, Spendesk chose to work with BPCE Payment Services.

While the SEPA indirect participant model offers many advantages, it also introduces technical and functional complexities, such as managing R-transactions and confirming or rejecting instant credit transfers.

Building bank integrations also takes time, and the integrations must be complemented with payment automation features to send, receive, and reconcile payments at scale.

To focus its engineering resources, therefore, on its core product, including card issuing capabilities, Spendesk chose Mambu Payments to connect to BPCE Payment Services and manage its SEPA indirect participant payment flows.

Spendesk now benefits from Mambu Payments’ direct integration with its SEPA sponsor bank and its overlaying payment automation capabilities to send and receive billions of euros in SEPA payments annually for its more than 3,500 customers.

By working with Mambu Payments instead of building in-house, Spendesk saved valuable product and engineering resources that could be reallocated to accelerate the development of its core platform.

Its banking operations team now also benefits from the automated management of incoming and outgoing SEPA payments at scale, allowing it to spend more time improving processes and supporting customers while significantly reducing costs.