Numeral Wants To Make Bank Accounts Into Microservices

Numeral wants to make bank accounts into microservices 

Meet Numeral, a startup from France that wants to change the way businesses do business. In contrast to the API that clients use to communicate with Numeral, the startup communicates directly with bank servers to upload payment files and work with legacy information systems. It's easier to think of your bank accounts as a separate service in your architecture if you remove that layer of complexity.

In the last month, Numeral said that it had raised $14.8 million (€13 million). Balderton Capital was the lead investor in the deal. Alexandre Prot, Tom Blomfield, Guillaume Princen, and Kima Ventures were also there. The Numeral team first worked together on the project at Logic Founders, eFounders' startup studio.

What Numeral Are Into

The best way to describe numeral is to first say what it isn't. Numeral is not a service for people who want to use apps for open banking. It is not a threat to Tink, TrueLayer, or Yapily, but it could hurt them.

Numeral is also not a company that sells banking-as-a-service. The company does not provide bank accounts, make IBANs, or give out cards.

"We are a payment automation platform for IT companies," co-founder and CEO Édouard Mandon told the New York Daily News. In order to make payments easier, we let IT companies link their bank accounts to our service.

While retail banks are just now starting to offer APIs, corporate banks have been running their own banking systems for a very long time now. However, don't expect a REST API with documentation pages. Many banks want you to send them a text file through a secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) server. In addition, the file must be formatted in a certain way.

Numeral's solution is aimed mostly at fintech, insurtech, and real estate businesses that rely a lot on bank transfers. Spendesk and Swile, for example, are some of the company's first clients. Numeral has built connectors for its first clients, so Spendesk and Swile can talk to their bank accounts through an API.

It wants to work with a dozen banks by the end of 2022. If you're a customer, you're more likely to learn about our service from a French bank that says Numeral is the APIs that they don't have.

After the integration is done, many customers can add payment capabilities and features to their apps. In addition, the startup has a web app for people who aren't very tech-savvy. This means they don't have to use the old online app from the corporate banks anymore.

To make it even more useful, Numeral can add more features to its API. Consider setting up an approval process, a notification system, and so on, and so on.

Moving Forward

In addition, the startup is looking into orchestration capabilities. If a person has a lot of bank accounts, payments may be sent to the right one based on a number of rules. Numeral could also be used to keep track of cash balances across different accounts.

This could be especially good for people who have accounts in a lot of different countries. Mandon worked at iBanFirst before he started Numeral. He knows how difficult it is to have a lot of partner banks spread out across a lot of countries.

Following the investment round, Numeral wants to grow to a team of 30 to 40 people. Also, the company plans to add more European countries to its coverage and customer base, including Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy. This comes after the company added new integrations with French banks.