Numeral, a young FinTech with great potential

A new FinTech appeared on the French market just six months ago. Called Numeral, its ambition is to automate transfers and direct debits thanks to an API capable of connecting companies with their banks. Its recent fundraising should help it achieve its lofty goals by tackling a crucial issue for its customers.

Numeral wins over in less than 6 months

Numeral has just announced a €13 million fundraising round led by Balderton Capital and completed by leading investors including Alexandre Prot (Qonto), Tom Blomfield (Monzo), Guillaume Princen (Stripe) and Kima Ventures.

The French FinTech is thus consolidating a model developed six months ago within the startup studio Logic Founders (itself a product of the Parisian startup incubator eFounders).

Its ambition: Deploy a successful SaaS payment automation platform for technology companies and facilitate the management of their payments (payment routing and account balancing).

Its target: Insurance companies (to settle claims), temporary employment agencies (to pay their workers) or BNPL companies for example. More globally, all professionals who need to send, receive and reconcile large volumes of payments with their banks.

Business model: a monthly subscription and a sliding scale commission system on transactions.

For the moment, Numeral focuses on technology companies working with APIs. It already counts, among its customers, renowned companies such as two French unicorns: Swile and Spendesk. This is a guarantee of confidence to promote its offer more widely today.

What are the challenges for Numeral?

Leveraging open banking to simplify payments: Banks have multiple interfaces for making transfers and direct debits. Numeral offers APIs to standardize these protocols, which are different between banks and even specific within the same bank depending on the operations you want to perform. This standardization will facilitate the integration of payment processes.

Modelling a developing offer for private individuals: The American payment specialist Stripe has managed to establish itself over the years as a reference in the field of payment between private individuals or, more recently, in the field of cash collection. This is the model Numeral is following today. However, the FinTech company has set itself apart by targeting the BtoB market.

A growing interest of Fintech in the B2B sector: While Stripe has become a reference in online payment by credit card, Numeral hopes to have the same destiny but in direct debit and wire transfer, the preferred methods of payment between companies.

Putting it into perspective

The fundraising announced by Numeral allows it to kick off 2022 by officially launching its platform and processing its first payment flows. The FinTech also plans to quickly offer new payment automation and management features.

Numeral also says it is expected to quickly add new banks to its platform to complete its centralized model; the FinTech currently has three French banking partners.

This development plan will be based on the recruitment of French and European profiles; Numeral’s team will soon grow from 10 to 40 employees.

Numeral hopes to eventually convince new customers on a European scale, particularly in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain.