A new industry partnership will enable software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms and financial institutions to integrate invoicing and billing functionality into their offerings.
The Germany-based embedded finance startup Monite has partnered with Codat, the universal API for small business data, to address a series of issues associated with integrating accounts payable and accounts receivable capabilities into existing apps.
It’s estimated that the average small business engages with 40 separate apps to manage its finances and operations effectively. Typically, this engagement would cater to all its accounting, expenses, sales, forecasting and analytics needs.
According to a report by Blissfully, which was published in 2020, this number of apps is growing around 30 per cent each year, an increase that has been attributed to the rise of new softwares and specifically the wider adoption of vertical SaaS tools.
Although vertical SaaS tools cater to specific industries, like restaurants, beauty salons or trades businesses for example, the lack of connectivity between them and the finance software being used, often generates siloed systems, increasing the workload involved in their maintenance.
Software providers must either build or integrate with products for bookkeeping and making payments to avoid business owners needing to spend hours each week transferring data between systems.
In light of these challenges, Monite and Codat’s partnership is set to enable SaaS platforms and financial institutions to integrate invoicing and billing functionality into their offering in a bid to cultivate a better connected and unified system for operational and financial management.
The combination of Monite’s APIs for fintech apps and Codat’s API for integration to third-party SME apps will open the door for new apps that cater to a broad range of SMB needs in one place.
“There is no shortage of great financial apps for SMEs. What’s still missing are the ‘super apps’ that bring everything together – a financial operating system created by neobanks or vertical SaaS companies to dominate the SME finance stack,” explains Ivan Maryasin, Monite’s co-founder and CEO.
Addressing the cost risk of building a new platform and how it redirected businesses’ resources, Maryasin explains how the companies’ collaboration will overcome this issue.
“With Codat’s powerful integrations now pre-built into Monite’s finance automation modules, customers of either company can get to market rapidly, saving time and money along the way, with great new apps or platforms that create a new level of finance workflow automation.”
Pete Lord, CEO and co-founder at Codat, adds: “It’s incredible to see the number of platforms coming to market to help SMBs, but it can be time-consuming to manage and get the most out of them all.
“Integrations like the ones that we’re enabling with Monite ensure that key financial data isn’t siloed and flows freely and automatically between systems – which means businesses can be managed from a single source of truth. This is another important step towards helping systems speak to each other, removing hours of painful admin and ultimately unnecessary barriers to growth.”
Codat’s API enables providers to connect to major apps relevant to small businesses. The London-founded company has around 200 clients, including many of the world’s top banks and fintechs.
Monite is a finance automation provider targeting organisations considering offering fintech solutions but who do not want to incur the cost and risk of internal development. Its offerings enable B2B brands to embed new finance features such as invoicing, AP automation and expense management directly into their existing interface.
Monite’s embeddable API platform allows brands to offer the functionality of specialised financial products within their own interface and serve all their customers’ business finance needs from a single platform.
Image and article originally from thefintechtimes.com. Read the original article here.