Efficiency and Security in Financial Services: A Swan Case Study with Forest Admin
Swan, a rapidly expanding fintech company, needed a robust admin panel to manage sensitive operations securely. They chose Forest Admin for its flexibility, ease of use, and strong security features. Read the case study.
Forest Admin helped us secure our sensitive actions, and there are quite a few when building and running banking services!
Executive Summary
Swan is a young company with a bold ambition to make banking operations so smooth that clients barely notice them. Having received successful 16M€ Series A funding led by Accel in 2021 and 38M€ Series B funding led by Lakestar in 2023, the startup is currently expanding across Europe and improving processes involving money for a growing number of customers.
As a licensed financial institution regulated by the ACPR, Swan needed a flexible, robust, and reliable internal tool from day one (in fact, even before Swan had officially launched) to run its operations smoothly and securely. The founders chose Forest Admin after hearing from other startup companies that it is easy to use, scalable, and offers the right level of security and flexibility.
About Swan
Swan is the easiest way to embed banking features into a product. Thanks to its simple APIs, European companies can integrate banking services such as accounts, cards, and payments quickly and easily into their own product. The result is a super-smooth user experience.
Co-founded in 2019 with a start-up Studio eFounders, Swan received a 5M€ Seed led by Creandum in 2020, followed by a 16M€ Series A led by Accel in 2021, and 38M€ Series B led by Lakestar in 2023.. Swan is a regulated financial institution with its own e-money license, which means they fully own the payment and fraud risk that allows their clients to go to market in weeks (instead of months) at a fraction of the cost of current providers.
We have recently interviewed Swan’s Julien Mettoudi, VP Payment, who described why they chose Forest Admin as their internal tool solution.
Swan’s Payment Group leverages industry knowledge, payments expertise, and general acumen to build and operate the banking products and a platform that powers money movement for all Swan financial products. Ultimately, the Payment Group is working towards a future in which all of the complexities that come with handling money (such as adopting new payment methods, booking and reconciling entries - technical vs. accounting vs. cash, integrating with banks and financial partners globally, addressing regulatory obligations, and so on) is hidden from Swan's partners and end-users.
The Payment Group comprises two complementary teams: Payment Products, which is in charge of building the platform, and Payment Operations, which operates it.
Challenges that made Swan look for an internal tool solution
From previous experience, I was familiar with the pain of not having an efficient back-office tool to manage payment operations, and I was happy to see that Swan’s founders were considering internal back-office/support tools as priorities too! – said Julien Mettoudi.
Every company that operates in financial services must conform to government regulations to prevent money laundering from the day of the official launch. Having full control over user data is fundamental to securing this compliance. That’s why the Payment Group at Swan was looking for an internal tool that:
- was robust, 99.99% available, flexible, and easy to maintain,
- had a clear and easy-to-navigate interface since all operations teams, such as compliance would use it,
- had a flexible and robust user management system,
- required low IT involvement so that developers could focus on more complex and user-facing products & projects,
- had efficient and reactive support since the solution would become one of the vertebral columns of the company.
Before joining Swan, Julien Mettoudi used to work with back-office solutions built in-house, and he wasn’t satisfied with them.
One of my former company had built an internal tool from scratch and added multiple layers. This made it super hard to maintain, and it didn’t do the job properly.
Forest Admin: An ideal solution
Forest Admin was the founders’ and Julien’s first choice, as they knew from other startup companies that the solution was robust and it offered the right level of both security and flexibility they were looking for. It was easy to start with and to set up according to Swan’s specific needs.
Swan has two main types of users that access Forest Admin daily:
- Users who need to access data but do not need to act on it.
- Users such as KYC Officers, Payment Operations Analysts, and Customer Support Officers, who need to act on data and who make heavy use of custom actions. They decided only to authorize data creation/modification/deletion through Forest Admin smart actions. This was the best way to ensure full traceability of actions and implement smart approval workflows.
Pretty much everyone at Swan uses Forest Admin in their everyday work. The most frequently used features are the search, filters, and actions. They also use the dashboard to showcase our most important figures (number of accounts, volumes of transactions, etc.) to the entire company in real time.
Screenshots from the Transaction Monitoring and Fraud Management live demo. Forest Admin has no access to Swan or any other customer data.
Initially, Swan had concerns about the capacity of the solution they were going to use when it came to supporting their growth in terms of the number of users, increased needs complexity, and security. However, as Julien Mettoudi has explained:
Forest Admin helped overcome all these challenges, and we were particularly happy with the quality of the support, the uptime, and the resilience of the solution. We went from 10 users to around 100 and are still very satisfied with Forest Admin’s flexibility. We also have direct contact with the Forest Admin team. They’ve been helpful and always available to receive our feedback and adjust their product roadmap accordingly.
Conclusion
Forest Admin has enabled the Payment Group at Swan to get an efficient and secure internal tool from day one. Over 100 users use it daily to deal with KYC processes, payment operations, and customer support.