Opportunity
Lucca’s software already helped more than one million end-users with complex accounting tasks. But HR professionals were still spending too much time on clunky expense processes. So Lucca decided to give them even more freedom and efficiency by automizing purchasing and expenses.
Solution
By connecting to Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service, Lucca could put financial features right at the center of their product. Lucca’s customers can now create their own accounts, with cards for employees to manage expenses, and automated payments for a streamlined experience.
Impact
With cards and accounts right offered as part of their regular subscription, Lucca now fully masters their entire UX and can offer better expense processes to HR professionals.
Helping 6,000 companies work smarter
Lucca’s software solutions are built to make HR tasks far easier to manage. As a mid-market leader, Lucca provides efficient answers to specific needs: leave and absence management, expense reports, digitization of HR files, performance reviews & goals, online payslip distribution, and time tracking. Every HR professional's dream.
Financial features for a simpler UX
Now, Lucca has up-scaled their product by putting payment features right at the center. For an HR tool, entering fintech territory was a natural next step. Lucca already offered great software for handling complex accounting, and adding payments on top just made sense.
To get there, Lucca had first tried working with a traditional bank to sync transactions but that proved too limiting; they were required to sell the payment features as add-ons. But with banking features right at the center of their product, natively integrated, Lucca could make them just another part of the regular subscription. So much simpler for everybody! To achieve this, they knew they needed to work with a partner that offered embedded banking. They talked to all the top players in the EU market, and Swan came out on top:
“What we liked at the start was the trust we felt when discussing with Swan’s founders. We felt they mastered their profession. With others, we were sitting across from a businessman who wanted to sell us features. With Swan, it was a discussion about our job, our vision, our difficulties. We sensed that our needs could have an impact on Swan’s roadmap, not to mention the pricing was easy to understand.”, says Product Manager Mathilde Fossat.
Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service empowers Lucca to provide the best possible experience for HR professionals. Check out what they’ve achieved:
How embedded banking improves Lucca’s Expense management
💳 Payment cards (virtual or physical) let users pay all their expenses, so they don’t have to pay out of pocket.
🔁 Transactions are automatically synchronized - the date, supplier, everything, is filled out in advance. Accountants and HR managers save so much time that was previously wasted on data entry!
🔐 Fraud protection. With deep financial integrations, you can’t modify details like the date, source, or bank. Data is more reliable and fraud is hard to achieve.
✅ Payment control. Easily decide who gets how much money and control what they can purchase with it. You could give the intern a virtual card with 100 euros a year so they are autonomous to buy croissants and coffee for morning meetings! 🥐
How embedded banking improves Lucca’s Purchasing & Supplier billing
Team building coming up, and your events organizer needs to book hotel rooms for the whole team? Or maybe your content manager needs a pack of credit for translations?
Let them request a virtual card! Virtual cards make people autonomous to purchase whatever they need to do their jobs efficiently. Afterward, they just have to attach the bill, to make things easy for accounting. It’s that easy. And this is exactly what Lucca built.
By putting more financial decision-making in the hands of employees and managers, companies can give their teams more freedom to move quickly, while keeping finances under control!
What was it like using Swan’s Banking-as-a-Service?
Lucca’s team (one product manager and five developers) integrated Swan in three steps: first, they added payment accounts, then single-use cards, and then permanent cards after that. Integration by API allowed them to easily synchronize their new cards with their existing expense app.
”We really liked Swan’s proximity and accessibility. Natural discussions continued all the way through integration and delivery. The team was available on Slack, and they were very easy to talk with even about technical issues.” says Mathilde. With past partners, Lucca sometimes waited 2 weeks to get a response about a technical problem, halting their work, but “being able to exchange with Swan’s Technical Account Managers on Slack changed everything.”
The team also appreciated access to many resources:
“As a product manager, it was really nice to have access to Swan’s dashboard, sandbox, the documentation. Everything was practical: ordering cards, testing transactions, authorizations.”
Ready-to-go interfaces for the account opening process also proved helpful:
”Swan’s nocode onboarding form was especially practical. Our customers only have to use it once, when they’re opening an account. And it’s so smooth because Swan included a register that finds companies by name and pre-fills all their info. The experience is great.”
Banking features are now just part of a regular Lucca subscription. Easy!
Lucca’s well-established HR software already masterfully handled complex accounting flows. Now, with banking features placed right at the core, it’s so much simpler. Lucca has entered fintech territory, where software solutions become truly valuable and even more useful than before. Congratulations to Lucca on this great product improvement!
Thinking about building banking services into your own product? Have a chat with our team to explore what you could build.
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