French business-to-business lender Defacto has selected cloud-native banking platform Mambu to automate the payment flows underpinning its receivable financing operations, a move that signals both the growing maturity of embedded SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) credit in Europe and the increasing pressure on specialist lenders to industrialise their back-office infrastructure without overhauling legacy arrangements.
Under the arrangement, Defacto is deploying Mambu Payments to gain Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) connectivity, enabling the firm to orchestrate both disbursements to borrowers and repayments from those same clients through a unified application programming interface (API). Critically, the integration does not require Defacto to dismantle or replace its existing banking relationships and infrastructure — a design choice that reflects a broader industry preference for composable, layered financial architecture over wholesale platform migrations.
Solving the Operational Bottleneck in Receivable Finance
Receivable financing — a form of short-term lending in which a business draws funds against outstanding invoices it is owed — is operationally intensive by nature. Each transaction cycle generates multiple payment events: the initial disbursement of capital to the borrower, followed by repayment once the underlying receivable is collected. At scale, manually managing these flows across disparate banking rails and reconciliation systems becomes a meaningful drag on unit economics. For a lender like Defacto, whose entire value proposition rests on speed and frictionless access to liquidity for SMEs, any latency or error in the payment layer translates directly into a diminished product experience and inflated operational costs.
By routing both sides of the transaction — outbound credit and inbound repayment — through a single Mambu-powered API connected to SEPA infrastructure, Defacto can collapse what was previously a multi-step, potentially multi-system process into a coherent, auditable payment loop. The practical effect is faster settlement, cleaner reconciliation, and a reduced surface area for operational risk.
Extension to a Second Institutional Partner Signals Scale Ambitions
Perhaps the most telling detail in the partnership announcement is that the Mambu Payments infrastructure is already being extended to a second institutional partner for Defacto. This matters because it reveals that the architecture was designed from the outset with multi-party scalability in mind, not as a bespoke point solution for a single funding relationship. As Defacto brings additional institutional capital providers onto its platform, having a standardised, API-driven payment rail means each new partner can be onboarded without bespoke engineering work — a significant operational lever as the lender looks to expand its funding base.
Founded in 2021, Defacto has moved quickly to establish itself in the competitive European B2B lending market, focusing specifically on the underserved segment of SMEs that need fast, flexible working capital against their receivables rather than traditional term loans. The firm's positioning aligns with a structural shift in European business lending, where technology-led specialty lenders are steadily capturing share from conventional banks — particularly for ticket sizes and turnaround times that incumbent institutions struggle to serve efficiently.
Mambu's Payments Layer as a Competitive Differentiator
For Mambu, the Defacto integration represents a demonstration of its payments capability as a standalone infrastructure layer rather than simply an adjunct to its core banking platform. The ability to offer SEPA connectivity through a composable API — one that sits alongside a client's existing banking setup rather than replacing it — positions Mambu as a pragmatic infrastructure partner for fintechs that need to move fast without incurring the cost and disruption of full platform replacement.
The SEPA network itself remains the backbone of euro-denominated payments across the eurozone and beyond, covering credit transfers and direct debits for more than 36 countries. Reliable, programmable access to SEPA rails is a non-trivial technical and regulatory undertaking for any non-bank lender. By abstracting that complexity behind a single API, Mambu reduces the barriers for specialist lenders to compete on speed and reliability — capabilities that are increasingly table stakes in the SME lending market.
What This Means for European SME Finance
The Defacto-Mambu partnership is a compact but instructive case study in how the infrastructure layer of European fintech lending is maturing. The emphasis on API-first, composable architecture — where new payment capabilities are layered onto existing banking setups rather than requiring wholesale replacement — reflects an industry that has learned from the painful and expensive platform migrations of the previous decade. For SME borrowers, the downstream effect is meaningful: faster disbursements, more reliable repayment processing, and lenders with the operational headroom to grow their books without proportional increases in back-office cost. As competitive pressure in B2B lending intensifies across the continent, the lenders who invest early in scalable payment infrastructure will be better positioned to serve the next wave of European SMEs seeking alternatives to traditional bank credit.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
