Years ago, before Swan was even a cygnet (that’s a baby swan), our founders were in a position you might be in right now. They wanted to give banking features, cards in particular, to their customers. They searched high and low for the best Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider that could help them do this with ease, however, they found the existing options so difficult to work with that they gave up entirely.
Newer and more useful solutions emerged over the years, but many still failed to provide a great end-to-end experience.
This is why we built Swan. Our founders knew, from experience, that so many businesses can benefit from embedding banking features into their offering, but they need it to be easily accessible, fast to integrate, and totally focused on the customer.
Compared to the first generation of BaaS providers, Swan is truly different, allowing you to focus on what truly matters - your customers - while we take care of the difficult work behind the scenes.
Here are the top five reasons why tech builders choose Swan.
1. Swan is easy
Embedding finance within non-financial products and services is not an easy task. It requires complex regulatory and compliance control — that’s just how it works when you’re moving and storing money on behalf of clients.
Many traditional BaaS providers will only work with you if you’re a regulated financial institution. This puts a significant burden on their own clients: they need to fill out endless paperwork to get a license and even hire a full compliance team so they can become a ‘regulated agent’, as it is called in the industry. The time between contract signing and actually launching your embedded banking features can stretch to more than a year under this operating model.
“It seemed like we would have to take the long and painful road of working with a BaaS provider which to us back then meant obtaining regulation, building out a small banking team, and a project lasting 12-18 months. References from existing BaaS company partners only confirmed that gloomy outlook – we weren’t so excited." Maël Ezzabdi, CPO of Agicap
Swan makes this process easy — we cover all the tricky stuff like know-your-customer (KYC), strong customer authentication (SCA), anti-money laundering (AML), the creation of safeguarding and settlement accounts to safely manage cash, and all communication with the regulatory authorities.
We have a strong product culture at Swan, and it bleeds into every aspect of what we build for you. We’ve built our offering to be as self-serve and full-stack as possible, so that you can focus on what your customers really need, and build the best possible solution for your business.
By full-stack, we mean that Swan gives you everything you need to embed finance into your product suite: a regulatory setup (KYC, SCA, AML, and the works) and a technical stack, with a proprietary core banking system and its ledger to process transactions and update financial records. Swan’s ledger is connected to the SEPA network, with its own BIC & IBANs.
We want to be the easiest BaaS on the market so you can build the best product without getting lost in the details.
2. Swan is fast
The flexibility of Swan’s offering helps you to go-live rapidly. In a matter of days, our white-label banking solution can get your project up and running. We even have a no-code onboarding flow on top of the core offering that lets you open accounts, issue cards and integrate payment flows.
Such speed and agility gives you the chance to experiment and develop confidently before fully committing with your time, money, and additional resources. Instead of an MVP in theory, you can have one in practice, at your fingertips, within a week.
3. Swan is transparent
There is a lot at stake when you embed finance into your product. You are committing significant capital, both financial and labor; you might be changing your company’s business model, or moving into an entirely new vertical.
Shouldn’t you have maximum visibility into what exactly you’re getting for your money? Many players gatekeep, requiring you to hold multiple calls, sign NDAs, and proactively seek the information you need to make an informed choice.
With Swan, it’s different.
We want our customers to know exactly what they get by partnering with us. There is an open sandbox that anyone, even your grandma, can use to start building with Swan. Our documentation for our APIs is equally accessible. We even have an event simulator to reproduce incoming transactions and other sensitive operations. This means your development team can get a headstart on assessing how easy integration will be, what needs to be built on top of what you already have and so on.
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Transparency extends to our approach to pricing, too. Swan has no up-front fees. None, zero. Some other providers require nearly six-figures upon contract signing. We don’t believe in that. We charge you a competitive monthly fee and we lay out precisely how the variable costs of our product work, again, for everyone to see on our website. Fairness is the most important aspect of Swan’s pricing strategy.
Building great products is not necessarily cheap, so we are not either. But we have designed our pricing first and foremost with our customers in mind; we know we make money when you scale, that's why we work for your success.
4. Swan is local
Here at Swan we are focused on expansion via localization. What does that mean exactly for you, the customer?
Well, with our banking license, we can partner with any company that operates in the European Economic Area (EEA). And with offices in France, Germany, and Spain, Swan offers geographically dedicated products, such as local IBANs.
Our partners, like Friday Finance, really appreciate our focus on expansion via localization:
5. Swan is supportive
We have your back and we are here to support you no matter your project’s objectives and requirements. Our public documentation is tip-top, as is our team of technical account managers, who bring the human touch to implementing embedded finance. With Swan you can be certain to have fintech experts dedicated to supporting your team and your embedded finance project. ♥️
When our customers do well, Swan does well. We take this to heart as we grow our company, so that our incentives are seamlessly aligned with our partners’ success.
So if you’re looking, you can choose Swan with a light heart
Weighing big decisions like a new BaaS provider can be huge for start-ups and scale-ups. At Swan, we want to make the decision easy.
If you are looking for a new partner to help you embed accounts, cards, or payments into your product, speak with one of our experts to evaluate what option best meets your needs.
Our specialist team has quite a lot of experience in providing embedded finance solutions to companies just like yours.
And numerous companies are already benefiting (and thriving!) from having made a great choice.
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