Pennylane: How digital wallets can simplify the lives of entrepreneurs and accountants

‍

Hey entrepreneurs, paying bills is finally easy!

Entrepreneurs dedicate about 10 hours weekly (!) to making manual entries of their invoices, says Pennylane. That's a good chunk of time that could be put to better use.

Pennylane’s financial management platform first solved this by automatically identifying and pre-filling invoice info. But they knew, back in 2020, that it was not enough. To take a step ahead, they decided to build Pennylane Wallet, facilitated by Swan's Banking-as-a-Service platform. It was just the first of many powerful product improvements. 

The user experience for paying bills has been broken for a long time.

Companies need a ton of many different tools to track sales, generate invoices, pay suppliers and manage expenses. This can be especially frustrating for entrepreneurs who, along with everything else they do, have to deal with everything related to finance, administration, HR. Bills, bills, bills! 

Lots of great software solutions out there help with this, but most of them still require you to frequently leave their platform to confirm payments on your own separate banking app. And as we know, manual payments can be a big waste of time. Who wants to deal with all those different systems?

Pennylane has solved this UX problem by linking with Swan's Banking-as-a-Service platform, to create the Pennylane Wallet. ⚡

By embedding a digital wallet functionality and enabling digital payments, Pennylane took their product to the next level and saved thousands of entrepreneurs some time — that now they can dedicate to their main business activity.

Their clients confirm it's a killer feature. By linking accounting to banking services, Pennylane Wallet drastically lightens the load of companies' operational management.
‍

Nicolas Benady, CEO of Swan said:

Pennylane Wallet is totally safe and secure

Swan is proud to help facilitate this much-needed product, through our Banking-as-a-Service platform. Via our e-money license passported across the European Economic Area, companies all over Europe can focus on building their best product while Swan owns compliance, regulation, risk, and data security infrastructure.

As a financial institution regulated by the French regulator, ACPR, Swan provides similar guarantees to a traditional bank. In other words, all money deposited in a Pennylane Wallet is totally safe and secure.

Pennylane Wallet lightens the load for business leaders and accountants

Paying bills is easier and simpler than ever before.

• Payments are centralized in one place. No need to connect to a separate banking account to pay for each bill one by one. Finally!
• You can pay for all your bills with only one click (even if they are for a bunch of different suppliers). 
• Deferred payments: Pay the same day, on the due date, or any other date you choose. This also lets you process your bills and plan their payment all at once. You won't have to deal with it later!
• Bills are automatically reconciled with their payments, thanks to a unique identifier associated with the transfer order.
• Basically, as soon as a transaction appears on a business leaders' Pennylane Wallet, their accountant has access and can see which bills correspond. No more sifting through lists and lists of payments, looking for typos.
  ‍

Arthur Waller, CEO of Pennylane said:

Pennylane takes full advantage of Swan’s embedded banking features. After building their wallet, they went even further to provide their own payment cards with all kinds of special features!

Deeper banking integration, sprint-by-sprint

Since connecting with Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service and launching the Pennylane wallet in 2020, Pennylane has taken consistent steps to become a dynamic all-in-one financial operating system for SMEs in France. Their product team cleverly takes advantage of all the banking features available for deep integration, most recently adding software-enabled corporate cards for expense management and automatic invoice reconciliation. We can’t wait to see what’s next.

If you’re on a similar journey with your product, and looking for banking features you could embed step by step, we’d love to hear about your vision and how you’d like to step-up your user experience.