Problem

‍Building and maintaining accounting integrations in-house wasn’t scalable

Defacto is a B2B fintech lender providing instant, pay-as-you-go financing to cover stock, marketing, and B2B receivables for SMEs. In less than 3 years, Defacto has lended almost 500 millions euros to over 10.000 SMEs in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Their clients include many service-based businesses with long payment delays: communication agencies, web marketing, video game creation companies.

Defacto addresses the need for rapid and flexible working capital financing by offering a digital lending experience where clients onboard autonomously and receive their financing eligibility in under a minute.

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In order to automate onboarding and offer eligibility, Defacto’s algorithm leverages as much data, from as many invoicing and accounting software as possible. This data is not readily available and this is where integrations become an essential part of Defecto’s product and growth strategy. They cannot serve a prospect if they cannot integrate with the accounting or invoicing software they use.

"Unlike traditional players, who rely on manual processes involving documents such as tax returns and business plans, we streamline operations. We extract raw data, standardize it, and input it into our scoring algorithm to deliver instant assessments. Therefore, to effectively serve a broad market segment, it is crucial to integrate with as many systems as possible. The greater the variety of tools that generate or store financial data, the more comprehensive our service can be.” Mathieu Galvani, Defecto Revenue Lead

To address this need, they first decided to test an integration aggregator on open banking. Because of the poor quality of the data output, the integration still required a lot of standardization work from them. Also the slow speed of the connection didn’t permit the fast onboarding experience they wanted to offer.

That led them to start building their own integrations, but they quickly discovered that properly developing and managing integrations require specialised skills that would divert them from their core product:

Firstly, prioritising is tough. If we're doing an integration, we're not doing something else. Is it worth it? Is it worth doing it now? Next, on the technical side, authentication is a significant challenge and we need to minimize this friction as much as possible. (...) How long will it take for us to receive the data? How meaningful and usable is the data format we retrieve from our client's integration? Is it easily reusable and can it be seamlessly reinjected into our standardization algorithm?” Mathieu Galvani, Defecto Revenue Lead

And lastly, maintenance would consume too much dev time:

“This is a real challenge because if there's a breaking change every month, we have to go back to it, and it's us who are impacted, meaning our engineers have to spend time on it.” Mathieu Galvani, Defecto Revenue Lead

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Solution

Using Chift’s Unified API’s to access financial data from more accounting and invoicing software

Realizing that managing integrations in house would not be efficient, Defacto looked for another solution and started getting Chift recommendations. After getting in touch with our team, Defacto could rapidly onboard our unified APIs:

“Overall, the pre-integration experience was excellent, super smooth, super fast, and the integration experience was very simple, and we were extremely well supported with great responsiveness. (…) Today, we have integrated the Accounting API and the Invoicing API.” Mathieu Galvani, Defecto Revenue Lead

Chift’s unified APIs allows Defacto to connect to a wide range of industry specific tools with a single connection. This also means that Defacto's team only have to maintain one connection, while Chift does the maintenance of all connections within the unified APIs.

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Results

Saving countless hours on building and maintaining integrations while expanding their TAM

By providing additional tool integrations, Chift directly increases Defacto’s addressable market size and becomes a strong growth lever. Thanks to our Unified APIs covering most of the biggest accounting and invoicing tools in France, they can now serve many more SME’s and realise their vision of a fast eligibility algorithm.

With many SME’s still transitioning from legacy tools to modern accounting and invoicing solutions, the market for Defacto is still growing fast and they can count on Chift to support their growth.

Thinking about expending through integrations? Book a Demo with our team!

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