No-code is great, open source is better
Swan’s easy platform offers no-code banking interfaces to any European company that wishes to use them. It’s a great, simple way to start providing banking services immediately without having to invest a lot of development time.
However, up until now, you were limited to some basic settings predefined by Swan, meaning either accepting the no-code app exactly as-is or building your own interface entirely from scratch. By open sourcing our interfaces, you get the best of both worlds: start from a fully-featured banking app, then customize it as much as you want.
Swan built the essential open source software for banking tech
We’re radically simplifying everything we can in a highly-regulated, complex industry. And as we improve the Swan platform, companies are taking less and less time to embed finance. Before, the most complex integrations could have taken up to 6 months. With Swan open source, that is reduced down to 1 month, and many products are now able to go live in literally hours or days. Regardless the complexity of your project, Swan’s open source strategy can reduce your time to market by 75%.
Like most tech companies, Swan is built on open source software, and we know its value!
Open source software has source code that is freely and publicly available; anyone can access, modify, and use it to meet their needs. Some of the world’s most influential tech companies (LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber) have all open sourced massive code bases, empowering developers worldwide to move quickly.
Our goal with open sourcing Swan is to support European innovation by making it drastically easier to embed banking features and user experiences. We’re convinced simplicity is the way forward, and these open sourced interfaces will only open up more opportunities for all sorts of tech companies.
Why you should check out Swan’s open-sourced banking interfaces
- Use it as a starting point to build banking into your product
- Integrate faster
- Customize your UX exactly the way you want
- Extend the solution with your own features
- Remove pieces you don’t need (maybe you want to mask some features, or skip steps)
- Even if you don’t use the source code, you can learn a lot from our reference implementation
- Finally, it would just be great to have you join our community 😊
Here’s what you get when you access:
- Swan’s internal code for our no-code banking interfaces, including the onboarding process used to open accounts. Consider this a reference implementation. You can learn, copy, and modify it to fit your needs!
- Access the code for all Swan features—even from our latest release. Every time Swan releases new features, you can check out how we did it and track how Swan implements API changes on the frontend.
- Documentation so you can understand why we built things the way we did:
- How we chose the order of the different steps
- Why certain fields are mandatory
- How we decide which country an account needs to be registered from
How to use Swan’s open source banking frontend
Install the open source project and in a few seconds, you can start customizing things and deploy really fast!
Tweak stuff
- Take the flows you like and tweak the UX writing for your audience. Our KYC/KYB process (Know Your Customer / Know Your Business) is a great example. This process is used in banking to check identities and collect required documents during when opening accounts. We painstakingly built and localized this process for multiple countries and you can straight up copy/paste it!
Add stuff
- Ultra-personalize the design to match your own. Add your brand’s flair to the colors, font, radius, writing, localization, and more.
- You can add your own features (an expense management tool may want to add extra validation steps for payment validation).
- Add entirely new steps to the user experience if you need to.
Remove stuff
- Swan offers membership management, but some partners don’t want to use it because they already handle it themselves. You can just remove this from the interface.
- Swan offers a complete onboarding flow for opening accounts, but some types of software, like expense management, might skip pieces where they already have the information — and just display that info and ask for confirmation.
- By default, Swan offers all companies the ability to offer multiple accounts for customers. But if you want to offer only one per customer, simply remove the “multiple accounts” option.
For the love of dogfooding
Dogfooding is the practice of using your own services—we do this enthusiastically at Swan. It’s an important part of our testing process, and to be sure of our own product! One way we do this is by issuing accounts and cards to Swan employees, friends, and family. We use these constantly, both out of pride (I mean—isn’t it cool that we build banking?), but also for quality assurance. What better way to test our own product than by using it in real life?
Another way we dogfood is more under the hood. Our team works on all kinds of open source projects, and we actually use them within Swan, all the time. Here are just a few of them:
- Boxed: Functional utility types and functions for TypeScript
- Chicane: A safe router for React and TypeScript
- Swan react-ux-form: A simple, fast, and opinionated form library for React & React Native focusing on UX
- Swan SRP: A modern SRP implementation for Node.js (v15+) and web browsers
In the end, open sourcing Swan is all about building more transparent connections with companies that build with Swan. By exposing our code, we’re showing we have nothing to hide, and it’s a gesture to say we’re all in this together!
And hey, if it weren’t for open source, Swan wouldn't exist. Few companies would.🤝
We hope Swan’s open sourcing will empower you to bring your banking product ideas to life!
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