Opportunity
While Italian law allows companies to offer considerable benefits, the available solutions were stuck in the past. Paper vouchers and web-based solutions were so awkward to use, that benefits went unspent.
Solution
Tundr had the vision to modernize things but needed support with setting up banking features. With Swan, Tundr was able to easily add all the banking features they needed to their product.
Impact
Tundr has revolutionized corporate benefits in Italy, and now offers smart cards and payments for all corporate benefits - right from their own app!
Tundr helps companies be more committed to sustainability and social causes. They follow a code of ethics and a Supply Chain Policy, which helps ensure they can guide people toward more conscious purchases. With this ethical foundation in mind, Tundr took the advice of experts in the benefits sector, to launch a new generation benefits platform that overcomes the rigidity of the current system. The Tundr App and Smart Card covers an extensive network in Italy with tens of thousands of points of sale both offline and online.
Bye-bye paper vouchers! This social fintech makes corporate benefits modern and easy.
When Jules-Arthur Sastre (Tundr Co-founder and CEO) and Giorgio Seveso (Tundr Co-founder and CFO) entered the workforce in Italy, they were surprised to find that, while Italian companies offer tons of benefits to employees, they were actually super awkward to access and generally went unused.
Jules tried to set up benefits for his own company and was quickly disheartened by how limiting existing offers were. That’s how Tundr was born. Tundr is a social fintech, designed around the needs of workers, and with an affordable model for companies of any size.
With Tundr, here’s what companies can offer to employees:
- Mastercard corporate cards
The cards can be loaded with vouchers for green mobility purchases, shopping, holidays, recreation, etc.
- An app focused on sustainability 🌍
Employees can monitor their benefits credit, discover dedicated discounts and estimate the environmental impact of each of their purchases. Employers, on the other hand, can use the web app to get instant reports on benefits usage and to manage expenses using customized filters.
Tundr found the easiest way to build banking features into a brand-new app.
When Tundr decided to build up their app, they had a clear vision of what they wanted to build: a great app that companies could offer their employees, paired with a smart spend card. But how do you set up card issuing? Especially if you don’t know much about banking... Jules explains:
At first, we hadn’t realized how long it would take to get a license. We looked into that for about 2 days, but it would have been costly and taken ages. After looking into regulation and everything, we saw things are quite heavy. So we listed out the banking features we wanted to integrate into our app and started looking for a partner to collaborate with.
After exploring different BaaS options, Tundr found Swan was the most effective bridge to building up a brand-new product with banking and payments at the core:
We were about to sign with an incumbent BaaS, when we had a call with Swan CEO Nico Benady. We understood Swan has the simplest go-to-market strategy. It was easier for us to implement. To be honest, setup cost was a factor, too. We were a very small, young company, and Swan allowed us to start building in the sandbox right away.
With Swan, they found more of a partner than a supplier, who would support them throughout the entire process:
Swan’s positioning is to offer BaaS to any type of company. To be honest, that’s exactly what it felt like working with them! We weren’t experts about banking. Swan accompanies companies from the start of an idea, through execution and business development. That accompaniment, plus the easy platform, helped us launch really quickly.
Even first-time fintech builders are autonomous with Swan’s sandbox and tools
Despite having never built a fintech, Lorenzo Saraniti, Co-founder & CTO, found it super easy to integrate with Swan.
Developing with Swan, everything is slick and self-explanatory. You’re self-sufficient to do everything on your own, with the Sandbox, the API explorer, the doc...just explore whatever sections you need. It’s well implemented.
He especially appreciated Swan’s tech stack and the modern choice of graphQL, much more efficient compared to traditional options:
"Another point is that Swan uses the graphQL library for mutations. It’s more efficient in terms of using filters or getting the data you need. If we had used competitors’ rest APIs, it would have been harder to define granularity and filters to do queries upon, or just to get data in the format we need. GraphQL was a big advantage of using Swan."
Whenever someone did want help from a real human being, Swan was responsive:
"Swan follows each step to make sure everything works. This helped us feel confident we’re making the right steps as we build. And they communicate by Slack which is way more instantaneous than email or ticket systems. A real partner, they would notice whenever anything was wrong and help us out."
Tundr launched easily and will internationalize quickly, thanks to Swan
With Swan, Tundr found a true partner and the most effective bridge to building up a seamless corporate benefits app from scratch. Tundr brought vision and market expertise, while Swan delivered the banking features they needed!
We’ll be launching in a few other European countries and Swan facilitates that. We don’t have to do anything extra for our banking features to work across Europe, so we can start rolling out to other countries without any issues.
Is your company ready to embed banking services? Looking for a way to scale quickly and expand across Europe? Have a chat with our team to explore what you could build.
