2024 wrapped: Our year of AI, e-invoicing, and unveiling LaaS

It may seem a little premature to post a “year in review” in November. But since we’re in finance and we know how busy the end-of-year period can be, it pays to be ahead of schedule.

So here’s how we’re closing the books—a little early—for 2024. 

This year has proven just how ready the world is for better lending experiences. We have the technical and regulatory conditions in place to completely transform the SMB loan process. 

We’re about to enter a new era in SMB lending. And Defacto is excited to be leading the way.

2024 in numbers

2024 was our biggest year yet. This year, Defacto hit a handful of milestones: 

• Over €700 million in financing 
• More than 10,000 SMBs served
• More than 100,000 loans granted
• Embedded with 15 partners in the small and medium business ecosystem
• Customers and partners in five countries
• A 24-person team of experienced tech, risk & finance experts 

All of this in only three years. 

5 unforgettable moments

1. Defacto got licensed

We believe strongly in a responsible financial sector. And we want to build products for partners and customers that live up to the highest standards. So Defacto became the first B2B fintech lending service to be licensed as a “Société de financement” by the French Prudential Supervisory Authority (ACPR).

It’s a big step, and an important investment. But it’s the only way to walk the talk and raise the standards for our industry. 

2. We launched Defacto Core 

Too many lenders struggle to serve SMBs. So we built the tools to help.

Defacto Core is a white-labeled (Laas) Lending-as-a-Service platform that makes near-instant funding decisions and self-service loan servicing possible for any bank, factor, or financial institution (payment institution, asset manager, credit insurer). 

We’re essentially lending our UX superpowers to the expert lenders. 

See how Rolling Funds uses Defacto Core to power its tailored BNPL service.

3. Our team grew by 71%

Adding 10 new members to our team was a bit milestone for us, as we’ve built the business on a lean scaling model. Our philosophy has always been to stay agile by hiring experienced professionals who can own their domains end-to-end.

But with big projects on the horizon and an even more ambitious year ahead, we knew it was the right moment to bring in more expertise.

Fittingly, we’re closing 2024 with 24 team members—still compact and scrappy, but now armed with even more firepower to drive our vision forward. Meet our newbies: 

• Engineering: Baptiste, David, Celine, and Barbara
• Credit risk: Matteo
• Compliance: Jean-Eloi
• Data: Samy and Marie-Laura
• Customer Experience: Ava
• Marketing: Stephanie (🙋🏼‍♀️)

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We’re also hiring for more critical roles—if you’re excited to join us, let’s talk!

4. We welcomed 5 new partners

Our goal is to make SMB lending easy, in part by embedding working capital financing into the tools and services SMBs already know and love. And our partners increase their revenue and customer value by offering embedded lending. Talk about a win-win. 

Welcome onboard to Greenway, Rolling Funds, INFINIT, Cashlab, and GCollect.

And if you’re interested in becoming a Defacto partner, get in touch!

5. We launched high-demand products

Defacto is all about shipping fast. And 2024 was flush with new product updates and improvements.

For everyone:

• A V2 of our real-time underwriting model: Using real-time transactions our underwriting model is even more accurate at short-term lending for SMBs.
• AI-native loan servicing. Both the underwriting model and our service operations use AI to make faster, smarter decisions for borrowers.

For borrowers:

• A dedicated repayments page and upgraded Direct Lending Dashboard
• Instant loan payouts to be even faster than our 27 seconds promise 
• Bulk exports of loan contracts to ease the accounting process. 
• Bulk uploads to analyze and pay multiple invoices at once

For partners:

• White-label onboarding, which lets partners offer our services directly to their clients with ease.
• Deferred Debit card financing, so that partners can seamlessly offer credit card products to their users.
• Streamlined payouts and repayments for a unified process and smoother experience.

Doubling down on our core beliefs

Every company has its values and beliefs. This year, we continued refining and reinforcing ours. Guided by our deep banking and SaaS DNA, we've made a strategic choice to: 

Own our value chain

We believe that, to really disrupt financial services, we need to own the mission critical aspects of lending and the IP. 

That’s why we rebuilt a scoring algorithm to own underwriting (instead of relying on external credit decisioning), we got our license to own our compliance, and revamped the servicing experience from onboarding to recollection. 

We embrace the necessary scale enablers (like Chift 🙌), but build and own the systems at the very heart of what we do: loans and lending. 

Work with the system, not against it

The financial sector has always been empowered by regulators, owned by incumbents, and advanced by innovators. But fintechs shouldn’t position themselves in opposition to banks or regulation—we’re all on the same continuum. 

Banks own the balance sheet and large products, while fintechs reinvent the user experience (including compliance) with tech agility and highly personalized customer management at scale. And when banks, fintechs, and public authorities work together effectively, the real magic can happen.

Read our Expert Views series on how banks and fintechs can collaborate.

Make contextual financing available everywhere SMBs are

From day one, Defacto has been built with an API-first mindset, which has been a key enabler of our scalability and flexibility. Today’s users expect their banking and financing solutions to work across multiple platforms, not just a single provider. 

So we continue to build our service to move fluidly between overlapping services with the expectations of a seamless experience—and we're constantly working to make it even more personalized and contextual.

Our obsessions in 2024

On top of our overarching beliefs, culture, and mission, we were perhaps a little too obsessed by these things this year:

• AI in fintech: But who isn’t?! Every semester, we dedicate our whole team to infusing even more artificial intelligence into our products, our operations, and the future of everything we’re building. So, naturally, we’re obsessed. And that includes more robust data protection and confidentiality.
  
  We welcomed thought leadership from Citi, Varsity, and J.P. Morgan, wrote our own explainers of automated underwriting and AI in lending, and met with some of the best in machine learning in banking.
  
  
• E-invoicing in France: We finally have a date to look forward to (September 2026!), and new clarity on PDPs, ODs, and the PFF. We gave talks and are excited to work even closer with PDPs to offer more contextual financing for SMBs.
  
  
• Fintech insights from around the web: The team quickly fell in love with a handful of fintech writers and thought leaders. Our Slack channels are full of the best from Simon Taylor (Fintech Brainfood), Alex Johnson (Fintech Takes), and Marcel Van Oost (Connecting the Dots in Fintech).
  
  
• The Paris Olympics: Some were pessimistic during the buildup, while others were excited. Mostly, we now mourn how peaceful and joyful Paris was during these short weeks.
  
  
• Chappell Roan: Despite hesitation at first, her music is now the go-to for our co-founder and CTO, Marco, who owns our office tunes.
  
  

The forecast for 2025

That’ll have to remain a secret, for now. But rest assured, we’ll keep working to make SMB lending more accessible and flexible with each month that passes. 

Stay tuned—Jordane, our CEO & cofounder, has some predictions on where the market is going. 👀

See fast, frictionless financing in action 

Got questions on how to optimize your working capital? Join our AMA webinar on Tuesday, December 13th at 17:30 CET with Mathieu Galvani, our in-house working-capital expert who'll show how you can easily finance invoices with Defacto.

Want to stay in the know of our other releases? Follow along on LinkedIn where we share our latest and greatest.