Guides Archives | Monite
How payment links can double revenue per customer for B2B platforms
April 12, 2023
Payment links are a powerful tool, but not all B2B platforms know they can use them to increase revenue by up to 2x per user with minimal investment.
If you want to grow your revenue per user fast, you need new features, a smooth user experience, and valuable integrations. One of the best ways to start is by embedding payment links. .
We’ve put together this guide to help you successfully integrate payment links with your B2B app and offer the right kind of invoicing experience for your customers.
But, before we get into the revenue boost payment links can give your B2B app, let’s cover some basics.
What is a payment link?
A payment link is a way for businesses to easily accept payments from their customers. They can come in the form of QR codes, payment buttons, or URLs that can be embedded into emails—or as dedicated payment web landings, which you can set up code-free. After clicking a payment link, customers are directed to a checkout page where they can complete their transaction.
Why are embedded payment links necessary?
The B2B payment process can be long, with SMBs and freelancers waiting up to 30 days to get paid for their services. The main causes are endless emails, incorrectly formatted invoices, and a lack of convenient payment methods.
B2B platforms can speed up this process by 40% using embedded payment links. This eliminates all the back-and-forth, while giving clients the option to pay right away with their preferred payment method.
How do payment links unlock new revenue streams?
There are several proven ways that payment links can monetize users more effectively:
- Additional SaaS revenue. Offer an option for your users to send their clients payment links (a benchmark market price for such a feature is $25 – $35 per user/mo).
- Payment fees. Earn between 0.20% to 0.50% commission on every payment completed through your platform
- Revenue share. Offer B2B customers a way to get paid by BNPL/financing while earning a 0.50% to 1% share.
Revenue calculator: Check how much money can you make with your inputs
The top 2 benefits of payment links
Since it takes an average of 30 days for B2B buyers to complete a payment, offering payment links that speed up the process will be a hit with your clients, helping you boost your revenue. But that’s not the only benefit—not by a long shot.
- You get easy access to new revenue
Toast first started as a POS software and now generates ~60% of its recurring revenue from payment processing.
Payment links—especially on a pay-as-you-go type pricing model—allow companies to easily use their existing customer base to create new, large-scale revenue streams. So, like Toast, companies can see a dramatic share of the total revenue shift to payments.
- Your customers will shift more invoices to your platform
If customers get paid faster through you, while their clients get more payment options, then, it’s a win-win for everyone—and your platform becomes a one-stop shop for all things payment.
Unlike subscription-based revenue, where every future upsell incurs customer success, sales and marketing costs—payment processing revenue can grow without any further investment once payment links are embedded.
Higher retention leads to more transactions, leading to more payment processing revenue for you. This becomes a perpetual revenue source.
4 companies already profiting from payment links
Payment links can create more revenue and transform your business into an all-in-one solution, leading to higher MAU.
With additional features like automated invoicing, payment reminders, invoice tracking, cash flow analysis, and more, you can offer even more value for customers and open new cash streams for your company.
Below are four companies leveraging payment links. They offer convenient payment requests to help their customers with multiple use cases, from no-code payment pages(Stripe) to additional paid functions to get cash faster (Xero).
- Quickbooks
- Xero
- Freshbooks
- Stripe
Big revenue gains start with small experiments
Payment processing is key to expanding revenue and TAM for Vertical SaaS and fintech companies. Instead of earning fixed revenue, these companies take a cut of all transactions made. This means that they can grow in tandem with the merchants on their platform. Plus, thanks to established merchant relationships, it’s much easier to sell payment processing as a quick add-on.
So, is it worth trying?
We’ll share the best strategies with you. Let’s discuss your case!
Leverage financial automations to make your marketplace a super app for SME customers
November 22, 2022
The world’s biggest online marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, are successful in part because as they scaled, they built out a raft of functionalities for the vendors that made their platforms stickier and the costs of switching higher.
This buildout of new functionalities such as fulfilment inventory management, after sales and dispute resolution, invoicing, VAT compliance, and so on, created a virtuous circle that has driven drastic growth for the platforms – the more vendors there are, the more shoppers they attract. And the more shoppers there are, the more vendors that come on board.
Why automating financial processes for SME customers can help you drive drastic growth
Every marketplace with any sort of ambition would love to have the sticky product suite that Amazon, eBay, and Etsy offer to their sellers. But if you are building out a B2B or vertical-focused marketplace in 2022, it is not possible to invest the resources into your product that the 800 pound gorillas of the marketplace world have.
However, you can accelerate your product offering in other ways, and one of those ways is through automating manual accounting and financial processes.
Financial automations – think of functionalities such as accounts receivable/invoicing, accounts payable, and payments – are a compelling addition to your marketplace product offering for two key related reasons:
- While the SMEs on your marketplace have accountancy needs like any other marketplace sellers, many of them use outdated software, or spreadsheets and manual processes for these purposes. As an example, one recent survey suggests that 50% of small businesses in the US don’t use accounting software.
- As noted by McKinsey, digital solutions are often designed primarily for large enterprises, meaning that small companies the world over are unders-served in financial automation and accounting tools.
Combined, these reasons mean that you have a large addressable market for financial automations which is also currently under-served by existing software vendors, making for a compelling opportunity to increase the stickiness of your marketplace, increase your revenue, and even attract new SME sellers.
You can accelerate your marketplace towards super app status
If you see an opportunity for your own marketplace to invest in financial automations for your SME customers, you are now faced with three choices:
- Build your own financial automations.
- Partner with a payments provider (such as Stripe or PayPal) that also offers financial automations for SMBs.
- Partner with a specialized provider (such as Monite) focused on financial automations for marketplaces and other platforms.
When presented with such choices, it is obvious that we will be advocating for the third choice. However, it is important to understand why that is, so let’s talk through the advantages and pitfalls of each approach for marketplaces specifically.
Build your own financial automations
To start with, let’s take a look at building an invoicing automation tool as an example of financial automation. As invoices are standardized documents similar across most countries, it may appear to make sense to build it in-house.
However, a point that is not alway well understood is that finance automations contain an incredible amount of edge cases and hidden complexity. For example, in the case of invoices each country has its own compulsory information, custom formats and industry and/or country-specific layout requirements.
Likewise, country-specific tax and/or regulatory information needs to be added. And as you expand to different markets, this complexity multiplies with new regulations, languages, and more becoming a drain on precious internal resources and stopping you from being able to focus on building what makes your marketplace truly unique.
Invoicing is not the only finance automation that is more costly to build than it may appear on the surface, and building them internally generally makes little sense when there are existing solutions that you can buy for a fraction of the cost.
Read more: Four reasons buying an embedded finance solution could be a huge win for your business
Partner with a payments provider that also offers financial automations
Some leading payments providers – Stripe and PayPal among them – offer financial automations including accounts receivable/invoicing, as well as their trusted payments technology.
This may look like an interesting proposition for your marketplace. After all, this is proven technology that powers payments and other solutions for millions of businesses. However, for several reasons they are not necessarily the ideal solution for marketplaces:
- Solutions such as these can be effective for online businesses that want to issue compliant invoices or build a checkout process that’s convenient to their customers, but are not built for the marketplace itself.
- Many of them have compliance limitations that can impact international expansion.
- There is often a lock-in to their payments solution also. This can be an issue because no matter how reliable the payment solution is, there are always some kinds of limitations in terms of payment methods. And on top of that, if their connection goes down, you have no option to revert to another provider.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, they are not dedicated financial automation providers. Therefore, their invoicing solutions are an added layer on top of their payment rails, whereas a dedicated provider such as Monite provides deeper functionality, outlined in the next section.
Partner with a specialized provider (such as Monite) focused on financial automations for marketplaces and other platforms
At the other end of the spectrum, you have solutions such as Monite, which are built primarily for marketplaces, neobanks, and fintechs, rather than online businesses that want to embed financial automations in their app or website.
In the case of Monite specifically, our goal is to provide marketplaces with solutions that help increase retention, upsell and cross-sell, and even attract new customers. We do this not through offering individual products, but building a suite that will ultimately help your business serve SMEs both inside and outside the marketplace.
For example, where some Payments Service Providers (PSPs) are building invoicing solutions for businesses as an add-on to their core offering, Monite is building these solutions as its core offering, with a range of features for marketplaces to enable their SME customers to invoice across different markets. But on top of that, with Monite, you can enable your customers to issue invoices for sales that have happened outside AND inside your marketplace.
With this type of relationship, you are no longer only a marketplace, but expanding your reach to other parts of the business.
And that isn’t all. PSPs that offer invoicing have a vested interest in you supporting their payments solution for your SME customers. But providers such as Monite have a more agnostic approach to payments. With Monite’s multi-rail payments solution, you benefit from the payment methods, redundancy, and stability of multiple PSPs, with a single integration. Now you can earn not only subscription fees on your invoicing solution, but also processing fees on your payments offering.
Read more: What is a multi-rail payments solution, and how can it drive growth for your B2B platform?
And finally, solutions such as Monite are constantly building out new features designed to help marketplaces, neobanks, and fintechs grow, meaning that you are not only buying the solution as it exists today, but will benefit from opportunities to add new products purpose built for marketplaces in the future.
Your marketplace can become a full operating system for your SME customers
So what does the long-term future look like for marketplaces that take this approach?
Currently, many SMEs use a number of finance tools or even still use Excel. But this situation is likely to change quickly, as nimble marketplaces and other players start to offer embedded financial automations and even full accountancy stacks on a single platform.
Those that do this in a smart, fast way, will quickly move on from being a place to do business, as most marketplaces are today, and into the realm of becoming a full operating system for their SME customers.
If your marketplace could benefit from financial automations today, contact us.
How adding multi-rail open banking to your embedded finance offering could pay huge dividends
October 20, 2022
A payment method that is becoming increasingly prominent – and which could help B2B platforms offer a real point of differentiation to their competitors – is open banking. Open banking payments are direct account-to-account (A2A) transactions, with money moved along a single set of rails with no other third parties involved, making them cheaper, faster, and more secure than card or wallet payments.
How your B2B platform can benefit
Imagine that alongside your embedded payments offering, which gives your merchants the possibility to support card, wallet and other payment methods, you can also provide your merchants with a payment method that is cheaper, faster, and more secure than cards or wallets.
With this you benefit from a powerful new feature that opens up a new revenue stream, while simultaneously making your platform stickier for your customers. And your merchants benefit in a number of ways also, particularly from a) cheaper (up to 90%!) transaction costs – giving them greater pricing power, b) almost zero fraud, since customers need to authenticate the payment in their bank app, rather than with card numbers, and c) instant settlement – meaning faster cashflow when compared to cards, which take 1-3 days to settle.
The challenge: Every open banking provider has its limits
Open banking payments are growing fast. By the end of 2021 in the UK, almost 27 million open banking payments had cumulatively been made, which was an increase of more than 500% in twelve months, while research suggests that global open banking payments volume will exceed $116 billion in 2026, from just under $4 billion in 2021. Offering open banking payments to merchants on your platform right now puts you ahead of your competitors, reinforcing your reputation for innovation, and making it less likely for them to leave you.
Furthermore, there are a growing number of open banking providers on the market today, and many of them are investing heavily in product development. But there is a catch.
Building an open banking provider is highly complex. On the technical side, different markets have different API standards, banks have their own individual specifications and requirements, and maintaining all these connections is a headache. On the licensing side, different licenses are required in the UK and EU. And where Payment Service Providers have been building out infrastructure to support digital card payments for 15-20 years in some cases, open banking was only really kick-started in 2018 under the PSD2 regulations, meaning the market is much less mature.
For these reasons, every open banking provider on the market today has limitations in terms of market coverage, in spite of heavy investment in product. As a B2B platform company, your merchants have diverse needs, including a range of bank connections and geographical reach. There is no single open banking provider on the market today which will meet these requirements.
Introducing multi-rail open banking
However, there is an option to embed open banking payments into your product offering – multi-rail open banking.
As you can see, a multi-rail open banking solution aggregates a range of open banking APIs and brings all these together under a single Monite API.
With a multi-rail approach, you benefit from the strengths of multiple open banking providers. So no matter what limitations an individual open banking provider may have in terms of number or quality of bank connections, licenses or so on, you will be able to ensure that merchants on your platform can benefit from low cost, low fraud, and fast payments.
The big opportunity: building to be best in class, buying to be all-in-one
And beyond these benefits, there is a much bigger long-term prize. Resources dictate that most B2B platforms need to make a choice whether to build a best-in-class solution, or an all-in-one solution. But actually, there is a third way, which combines the best of both worlds.
Embedded finance specialists such as Monite build financial automations at scale, and multi-rail open banking is only one of the products that are available.
Consider the huge range of financial automations that your platform could offer – invoicing, payroll, accounts payable, and expense management, to name a few. Building these out internally is a daunting task – expensive, time-consuming, and incurring huge technical debt.
In comparison, by partnering with a provider such as Monite – which has already solved complexity and edge cases at scale – you can retain a core focus on building what makes you best in class, while simultaneously buying products that make you an all-in-one solution for your B2B customers. With this approach, you are in a position to leapfrog competition on either side of you, both those competitors building for best in class, and those building for all-in-one.
All the while ensuring your solution is extremely sticky and with multiple ways to monetize.
How B2B tech product managers should approach third-party embedded finance APIs
October 20, 2022
A key challenge that fintech, SaaS, and B2B platforms face as they scale is adding new functionality that provides the business with opportunities for upsell and customer acquisition.
In this case, rather than build in-house, the best approach is to leverage a third-party API which can bring value-add functionality for your SME customers to your platform quickly and easily.
However, what are the key considerations when selecting an API? For example, some APIs have a great deal of functionality, but are technically difficult to work with. This can cause integration problems for your developers, which leads to slower time to market and can potentially cause issues for your customer in the future if something breaks. On the other hand, sometimes an API can be designed well technically, but not really provide the value added functionality you need for your customers. An effective API needs to have a good balance between these two objectives.
This article helps you understand some of the key considerations in selecting an API from technical and regulatory perspectives, as well as a business one, so you can ask the right questions and collaborate with your developers more effectively.
Usability for your developers
There is a lot of discussion around the advantages and disadvantages of API standards, such as REST, GraphQL, SOAP, and so on. But usability – how easy it is for your developers to accomplish your desired tasks with the API – is a much deeper topic than which standard your API partner is following.
A good way to test usability is in a sandbox environment where your developer can test things out quickly, without too much information, and see how fast and easy it is to accomplish the desired task. As a product manager, you can find out early if a sandbox or test environment exists, or how your developers can quickly assess the usability of the API.
Functionality for your customers
As mentioned, an API can have a good level of usability, but not provide your SME customers with the functionality that will move the needle in terms of customer acquisition and upsell. So it’s important to make sure that the API has been designed with the input of someone who understands your business and your customers’ needs.
This means the team building the API should not only be made up of technical people. Rather, it should also include someone who understands how both you and your end customers interact with it. This person should be able to talk you through why an API is designed in such a way, the value it brings to your customers, and take your feedback on board for future iterations and product development.
An appropriate level of security for handling other people’s money and data
Financial automations are, of course, extra sensitive, and it is critical to be sure that any third-party APIs in your platform are secure. To be sure that this is the case, some relevant areas for discussion include the provider’s practices around GDPR, PSD2, PCI/PII and any other regulations, whether they have any relevant certifications, their security practices, and where data is stored. When choosing an API provider, it is wise to get in touch with their compliance and security team early on, to learn more about their practices and assess whether they meet your standards.
Ease of integration with your existing systems
At this point in your company’s growth, your platform or app will already be live and serving customers, so it is important that if you are going to partner with a third-party API, it can easily integrate with your existing platform. An API created with only simplicity in mind runs the risk of becoming overly tailored, serving only very specific use cases, and may not be flexible enough for other use cases. For this, a third-party API needs to be simple enough to work with easily, but agnostic and flexible enough to fit with your existing stack.
Here you can ask your developers and tech leads to assess the complexity of integration, including a call for your team to discuss the integration with the tech team from the API provider. In addition, you look at feedback in key developer communities such as GitHub.
Good support and documentation
Many developer questions can be covered by good documentation, FAQs, or forums. But self-service has limits. For more in-depth questions or other complications, there should be some type of technical support available.
In addition, it may be worth asking if your potential API partner offers software development kits (SDKs). These can help your developers by offering building blocks for the creation of an application, instead of them having to start from scratch.
One other thing to look out for is if a potential API partner publishes their integration artifacts, such as Postman Collections, integration demos, the source code of their products, and perhaps have educational videos on YouTube. Resources such as these can save you technical team time and energy.
Stability and scalability
Stability is critical to ensure your internal resources are not needed to constantly maintain your API connection, but also to avoid the business impact of having a connection break. Key questions to ask your API provider include geographical coverage, their SLAs in these regions, error rates, rate limiting practices, how quickly they can address latency issues, and how well their platform architecture can be adjusted to the peaks on your side.
About the Monite API for embedded finance
At Monite, we build our API with the above principles in mind, including good documentation, an API Explorer, and SDKs. In addition, our multirail approach to payments hides a lot of complexity from our fintech, SaaS, and B2B platform customers. Rather than needing to deal with multiple APIs and all the complexity that comes with that, the fact that you only need the single Monite API to connect with multiple payment service providers saves a lot of time and provides more predictability and stability.
We recently published our API Style Guide on GitHub, which you are free to download and give feedback.
To find out more about what embedded finance API can do for your fintech, SaaS, or B2B platform, contact us.
Embedded finance can help you leapfrog competitors fast – here’s how to approach it
October 18, 2022
As fintech, SaaS, and B2B platforms scale, a key product challenge is how to add new functionality that makes your platform stickier and provides your business with more opportunities for upsell and customer acquisition.
Aside from what you build in-house, the standard approach is to discuss internally what you need, assign resources and expectations, and then go out to the market and speak to a third party for a particular functionality or project.
But actually, for a number of reasons, it may be a better approach to talk to third parties early – even as you are still defining the scope of the project. In this post we are going to look at why this is important in the scoping phase, and help you think out of the box and to get a wider view of how you can leverage embedded finance for maximum advantage.
Solutions are more powerful than products, products are more powerful than features
Let’s take a look at an example. Say you assign a project to look at an accounts payable product, with the idea of enabling SME customers to collect, review, and approve invoices via API.
You look at what kinds of resources you need, how it fits in with and complements your existing product roadmap, what kinds of upsell opportunities you may have for your SME clients, and so on. You then have a specific focus in mind when you look at potential embedded finance partners.
But once you start your discussions, you may find that there are not only unforeseen questions, but also complementary products you can add for a fraction of extra resources, which can deliver multiples of value on your original plan. For example, if you want to provide an accounts payable product, it would be extremely convenient for your customers if you could add an invoicing product to go with it. And if you were to offer customers an invoicing product, it would make sense to enable invoices to be paid with an integrated payments solution, also.
Bundling these products into an integrated solution has several obvious benefits:
- It increases retention, since your customers have less need to shop around.
- It increases upsell opportunities, since your existing customers can add new products.
- It attracts new customers, since the new functionality makes your platform more compelling.
And beyond these obvious benefits are a number of less obvious ones, which can unlock more value for your platform:
- You can provide forecasting decisions thanks to better data.
- You can lower the cost of doing business even as you increase your functionality, since you are investing in multiple solutions.
- With the right partner you are not only buying for today, but also for new embedded products you can add in the future.
In fact, carefully partnering with the right embedded finance provider can take you a step closer to becoming a full operating system for your SME customers.
You can go bigger than you think, earlier than you realize, without draining resources
The time to think of adding incremental value to your platform through buying or building individual embedded finance products is over. In fact, you may be positively surprised at the potential to add multiples of value for your SME customers with end-to-end solutions or product suites, rather than only individual products.
However, it is also important to note that embedded finance is at an inflection point. B2B platforms no longer need to invest large amounts of resources into building financial automations. The winners of tomorrow are already embedding financial automations today, and the pace of innovation is set to accelerate.
With a partner such as Monite, you can focus on building what makes you best in class, while our embedded automations can help you become all in one. With the right partner you can build a combination of deep and wide super app functionality that can enable you to leapfrog competitors, faster and with far fewer resources than you may imagine.
Cloud Billing API integration for banks and fintechs
September 1, 2022
More and more businesses want to have their invoicing processes as touchless and automated as possible. While some might go for a standalone Cloud Billing API provider, many more would prefer to have their billing needs covered by their bank.
What is Cloud Billing API?
Using a compliant Cloud Billing API, businesses seeking to automate their Accounts Receivable operations can create and manage regular and e invoices, thus reducing invoice mismatches and other risks. Cloud Billing API integrations translate to significant savings in terms of time and headcount needed to manage all outgoing invoices. After all, a comprehensive invoicing or billing API solution can enable businesses to:
- Send quotes and electronic invoices
- Issue compliant reminders
- Track unpaid invoices
- And more
To truly automate not just billing, but also other Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable functions, SMEs often find themselves using multiple apps, APIs and platforms. With Monite, banks and financial platforms can help their clients automate the majority of AR, AP and Payments functions.
Neobanks are already offering billing functionality
The Fintech space is becoming more and more competitive, with platforms and neobanks offering advanced solutions for automating AR and AP functions. Some bigger names that already offer their customers billing include Oxygen, Tide, Qonto, and Spenda, among others.
Additional revenue with Cloud Billing API
By integrating Monite’s Invoicing API, banks and financial platforms can earn additional revenue via two streams:
- SaaS fees. Business customers can be charged a fee for getting access to billing. By providing billing as a core functionality of a higher-tier plan, there is an additional incentive for customers to upgrade.
- Processing fees. It is also possible to earn commissions on every invoice payment made through a link.
You can estimate your potential earnings from offering Cloud Billing API via our AR automation calculator.
Want to learn how Cloud Billing API can grow your business? Get in touch with Monite today.
API Invoice Processing solution – AP Automation
August 29, 2022
In this article, we at Monite explain what AP automation is, how companies can develop their own solution, and how they can benefit from it.
What is AP Automation?
Accounts payable automation (AP automation, for short) is the process of digitally handling incoming invoices that saves time and costs and decreases human error rates. Other upsides of AP automation include improved transparency, and the mitigation of fraud risks and non-compliance issues.
Companies with sizeable accounting departments benefit from AP automation solutions, which can be provided by a bank, neobank, payments platform or Fintech SaaS provider.
Should Fintechs develop their own AP processing solutions?
For Fintech companies looking to build the next Super App, developing an AP automation solution in-house can look like the logical next step. However, building a sophisticated AP automation tool comes with its own setbacks. Rarely can a Fintech startup afford to allocate enough capacity to build and maintain a solution that provides a seamless experience for its clients.
Unfortunately, without significant investment (that could be used on developing core functionality), a home-built AP solution will be subpar. Even worse, it might not really pay off, as limited functionality means limited revenue opportunities.
Companies wishing to save their engineering talent and money can opt for an API invoice processing solution.
What are the benefits of an API invoice processing solution?
Integrating an API-based AP automation solution saves time and costs that would otherwise be spent on both development and maintenance. In addition to direct savings, it also opens new revenue opportunities.
Monite Accounts Payable API was built with Fintech companies in mind. It basically allows clients to process (collect, review, approve and pay) incoming supplier invoices without ever leaving the payment provider’s environment.
What can Monite API invoice processing solution do?
As you can learn from our API documentation, Monite AP automation API can take handle the entire invoice processing cycle. Thanks to its Invoice Recognition API and other features, it can:
- Collect invoices. Users can upload or email invoices (case by case or in batches)
- Review invoices. Users can annotate, ask colleagues for additional information
- Approve invoices. The approval flow can be customized by the client
- Pay invoices. Payments can be pre-prepared
- Reconcile invoices. All payments-related documents can be easily exported
- Analyze AP payments. Users can get a full overview of suppliers and paid invoices
E-invoice API integration for banking and financial platforms
August 24, 2022
E-invoicing API integration can unlock additional revenue streams and help neobanks and financial platforms take another step towards becoming true Super Apps.
What is e-invoicing?
Electronic invoicing (also known as E-invoicing) is a form of invoicing, when the client is presented not with a paper or scanned invoice but with an E-invoice.
An e invoice follows a predefined, standardized format. All data (e.g. PO number, VAT number, and so on) is provided in a structured way, and the e invoice can be automatically imported and processed by the purchasing organization’s AP system. E-invoicing systems commonly use electronic data interchange (EDI) and XML formats to make data exchange easier.
While e invoicing itself has been on the market for at least 30 years, its adoption varies from market to market. For example, across the European Union, E-invoicing has been standardized since 2020.
What are the benefits of the E-invoice API?
The integration of API for e invoicing is a suitable solution for banks and other financial platforms that do not want to waste time on building their own E-invoicing system. By using a compliant e invoicing API solution, neobanks, banks and other financial services providers can allow their business clients to:
- Mitigate the risks associated with fraud and tax leakage
- Save money and resources that would be wasted on manual invoicing
- Reduce invoice mismatches
- Unlock additional benefits like easy tax claims
The benefits of Monite e invoicing API
With Monite e invoice API, it is easy to aggregate electronic invoices from multiple countries and ensure that all related flows (like reconciliation or accounting export) are in line with e invoicing requirements of any given market.
E-invoicing API is only one part of making finance and payments operations easier for clients. With Monite, in addition to helping clients automate Accounts Receivable functions (E-invoice API covers a part of it), financial platforms can also help clients automate Accounts Payable functions.
Monite offers not only fully compliant e invoicing API, but also a range of other functions that can help a bank, neobank or financial platform to become a true Super App for businesses. Additional benefits financial platforms can offer to their clients with Monite include:
- Setting up and receiving online payments
- Setting up automated and compliant reminders
- Auto-mapping invoices to payments & export for accounting purposes
Signing up in Monite means that you don’t have to spend engineering hours on building solutions in-house or waste your budget on multiple APIs from different providers.
Get in touch for a demo today.
Online Invoicing API meets Invoice Generator API
August 10, 2022
Invoice Generator API is the next big step for the simpler world of automated document processing.
What is an Online Invoicing API?
With the help of Online Invoicing API, companies can generate and manage invoices based on various input data. SMEs and large corporates can save time and resources by automating the generation and processing of invoices. Online Invoicing API is the first step in offering comprehensive Accounts Receivable automation. With a compliant Online Invoicing API, it is possible to send custom quotes & invoices, issue reminders, review unpaid invoices, and auto-reconcile invoices.
Unfortunately, only a handful of banks and Fintech companies provide their customers with this functionality. This leaves SMBs in a situation where they have to seek out standalone online invoicing solutions. In fact, an average SMB has to use 40+ apps to manage finances and operations, while much of that functionality could be provided by a single platform via API integrations.
Why should banks and fintechs integrate Invoice Generator API?
Banks and B2B-focused fintechs that do not provide their customers with advanced Accounts Receivable automation solutions (based on Online Invoicing API, Invoice Generator API, etc.), miss out on many opportunities. First, they become less competitive, as other companies add such functionality. Second, they lose additional income streams that come with AR automation.
How does Monite Invoice Generator API work?
Banks, neobanks and fintech providers can streamline and automate the invoice generation process for clients with the help of Monite. Invoice Generator API integrations can create counterparts that represent customers, add products that will be listed in the invoice, add additional invoice data, get the applicable VAT rate, and more.
In other words, Monite’s Invoice Generator API can integrate a comprehensive PDF conversion system with existing applications. Using the integration, users can configure delivery method, payment schedule and other settings before they generate the invoice.
Is Monite’s solution better than a free invoice API?
While a free invoice API can suit a smaller operation (a company or person seeking to automate their invoicing procedures), integrating a public API into a financial services platform would lead to security and non-compliance issues. Monite’s compliant Online Invoicing API is safe, secure, reliable and built with the highly regulated area of Finance in mind.
What is a multi-rail payments solution, and how can it drive growth for your B2B platform?
August 10, 2022
A solution for accepting payments is critical for any merchant. And B2B platforms that serve merchants, such as neobanks, marketplaces, and vertical-focused apps, are constantly looking for ways to make their solutions more compelling. So if your B2B platform could offer merchants a way to accept payments, you would have a great upsell opportunity.
For example, imagine you are an accounting platform targeting small and medium sized businesses. If you can offer your SMB merchants a solution to accept payments, you benefit from:
- A compelling new product that supports your core offering,
- The ability to open up new revenue streams and generate more revenue per customer, and
- Increased stickiness of your platform, since leaving your accounting platform will also mean that your merchants need to integrate with a new payments provider first.
The Problem
The potential of this kind of value unlock should capture the attention of any B2B platform. However, offering a compelling payments solution is not straightforward. Let’s take a look at why this is the case.
most logical way to embed a payments solution into your product offering is to partner with a recognized and trusted payments provider such as Mollie, Stripe, or Adyen, which will ensure your merchants benefit from a reliable solution that includes a range of payment methods plus built-in risk solutions, and so on. But there are two key problems with this approach.
First, if you partner with a single major payments provider, you are not adding significant value to your customers. As a critical business function, the overwhelming majority of merchants will already have invested in a solution that meets their needs, so there would be little reason for them to switch to your embedded solution.
And second, every payments solution has limitations and risks. No matter how good a single payments provider is, they will always lack certain payment methods, optimizations, functionalities, and so on.
Ultimately, if you embed a single payments provider such as those mentioned above in your product offering, you are passing on all its limitations to your customers, in terms of payment methods, risk management, and so on. And in a worst-case scenario, if the payment provider has downtime, this will impact your customers directly.
Introducing Multi-Rail Payments – and why it benefits your merchants
However, there is a better option to embed a payments solution into your product offering – multi-rail payments.
As you can see, a multi-rail payments solution aggregates a range of payments solutions and brings all these together under a single Monite API.
The concept is relatively straightforward, but the advantages are broad. With a multi-rail payments approach, Monite’s customers’ customers can benefit from the strengths of every payments provider, while reducing the dependency and risks associated with having a single solution. This means:
- The right payment methods. Your merchants can offer the payment methods they want for their particular market or vertical, no matter what the limitations of any individual payments provider.
- Ease of integration. Since it is a single API that aggregates connections to multiple players in the payments value chain, it is far faster and easier to do this than if a platform or merchant did this directly.
- Lower costs. On a related note, since Monite is aggregating payment solutions for multiple platforms and an even greater number of merchants, the cost for the merchant to connect to multiple providers and solutions is far lower than if they did it themselves.
- Redundancy. Even if one provider fails, or a connection is sub-optimal, there will always be fallback options if needed.
- New revenue streams. You are able to generate more revenue per merchant through this compelling new product.
- And finally, open banking optimization. Open banking is becoming increasingly important for many merchants. However, the connections of individual providers are not always airtight, and every provider has geographical limitations. With Monite, multiple connections means you benefit from the most stable connections and the widest geographical reach.
With a multi-rail payments solution, your platform is in a position to offer a compelling and cost-effective alternative to your merchants’ existing payments setup.
The Big Opportunity: building to be best in class, buying to be all-in-one
And beyond these benefits, there is a much bigger long-term prize. Resources dictate that most B2B platforms need to make a choice whether to build a best-in-class solution, or an all-in-one solution. But actually, there is a third way, which combines the best of both worlds.
Embedded finance specialists such as Monite build financial automations at scale, and multi-rail payments is only one of the products that are on offer. Consider the huge range of financial automations that your platform could offer – invoicing, payroll, accounts payable, and expense management, to name a few.
Building these out internally is a daunting task – expensive, time-consuming, and incurring huge technical debt. But by partnering with a provider such as Monite – which has already solved complexity and edge cases at scale – you can retain a core focus on building what makes you best in class, while simultaneously buying products that make you an all-in-one solution for your B2B customers.
With the new approach, you are in a position to leapfrog competition on either side of you, both those competitors building for best in class, and those building for all-in-one. All the while ensuring your solution is extremely sticky and with multiple ways to monetize.
