How do you bring together all of the payment and financial management features that SMBs, startups, and digital nomads need to succeed? A European startup highlights the significant practical benefits of modular infrastructure and embedded finance.
A suite of capabilities finely tuned to the needs of users, integration-friendly, easily-expandable architecture, lower overheads, watertight compliance: these were some of the key aims of Peanuds co-founder, Florian Reike. Here’s how Weavr is equipping this exciting new platform to achieve them…
The challenge: building for success
What are digitally focused nomads and entrepreneurs seeking? Increasingly, they prioritise lower taxes, reduced costs of living and business operations, and minimal bureaucracy. This explains the rise of Europe’s startup hotspots in places like Cyprus, Malta, Portugal, and beyond.
Startups in these locations, founded by both local entrepreneurs and digital nomads, span a wide range of digital industries—from fintech and AI to e-commerce and consulting. Regardless of where they choose to base themselves, freelancers and entrepreneurs require efficient financial infrastructure, including instant payments, virtual cards, and the same tools available to other European founders.
Peanuds was conceived as an effective way to meet these needs. Through an intuitive platform, Peanuds makes it possible for users to make payments, creative virtual and physical cards, and hold and transfer money (including in different currencies). The platform also makes it possible to invite team members so they can access their own cards, IBANs, and other tools with customisable settings, limits, and functionalities.
Above all, Peanuds prioritises hands-on, personalised customer support. In contrast, traditional financial institutions in regions popular with digital nomads may lack a deep understanding of their clients’ specific needs and the technical capabilities necessary to support the operations of modern startups effectively.
For any startup, once you have established the what and why of your offering comes the question of how you will deliver it. In building out the offering, the Peanuds founders had to resolve the following:
- Strong customer support. Managing customer expectations, while also obtaining a license, and building core functionalities, could be incredibly challenging.
- Funding priorities. A financial institution or e-money solution will typically spend around 70% of its IT budget on maintenance, and just 30% on innovation. Peanuds co-founder Florian Reike wanted to turn that on its head.
- Licensing. Acquiring a license while building your platform may seem appealing but it is costly and time-consuming. These resources may be better spent developing an MVP to justify the investment and generate revenue. The application process also diverts attention from solving client challenges and refining the core business. Peanuds chose to focus entirely on their core product first.
The approach: why embedded finance?
The answer? As Florian explains, “Building functionalities like investment products or card solutions once took years. With embedded finance, Peanuds’ modular architecture enables quick integration of providers for use cases like investing and lending. This also allows servicing diverse client needs under one platform and login—think Revolut and Wise in one interface.” In other words, if clients need it, modular architecture – coupled with the ability to embed plug-and-play financial services – equips Peanuds to deliver it.
More specifically, Florian identifies three major benefits of embedded finance in terms of getting the platform off the ground. The first relates to speed of development: “By working with an embedded finance provider, we can launch in one year instead of three.”
Secondly, spend: “Our burn rate is substantially lower, mostly due to not having a dedicated compliance team in-house.”
Finally, there’s the ability to target internal resources on what’s important: “We can focus on our core business – validating the business case, building processes, and developing the product – instead of spending years on licensing”.
The embedded finance journey: why Weavr?
For Peanuds, there were three major factors that led to the selection of Weavr as an embedded finance partner: a robust feature set that spoke directly to what the new business was seeking to achieve, proven technology, and competitive pricing.
As Florian puts it: “After extensive research, we found that no other provider matched this combination of features, pricing, and expertise. In essence, it was the best mix of the qualities we were seeking”.
The embedded finance solution
Peanuds partnered with Weavr, which in turn collaborates with licensed entity Paynetics AD, to integrate a tailored suite of features, including physical and virtual cards, IBANs, and robust account management tools. This comprehensive toolkit equips Peanuds to handle management and compliance effortlessly, with detailed insights into specific accounts and transactions. By leveraging Weavr’s Webhooks and API, along with custom implementations by Peanuds, the platform delivers seamless onboarding and efficient customer support.
Embedded finance underpins Peanuds’ innovative business model, enabling them to deliver exceptional user experiences without the complexity of managing core payment functionality or compliance in-house. With Weavr providing physical and virtual cards alongside dedicated IBANs, Peanuds avoided the need for an in-house compliance team, allowing them to launch a market-specific product at a fraction of the typical time and cost.
So, what does this mean for Peanuds users?
Whether catering to cutting-edge tech startups, e-commerce businesses, or small software agencies in Cyprus, Portugal, or Malta, Peanuds sets itself apart with hands-on personalised support, a streamlined user experience, and a rich feature set. In these digital nomad hotspots, traditional financial institutions often fall short, offering less intuitive solutions, higher costs, and slower support.
For many startups, Peanuds eliminates the frustration of working with local financial institutions that struggle to meet their needs. Instead, it offers a competitive suite of features that empower teams and save businesses significant time on financial tasks like accounting and invoice management.
What this means for Peanuds and its customers
- Competitive pricing: with lower operational costs, Peanuds can pass on these benefits to customers through competitive pricing, without compromising on quality.
- Time-to-market: customers benefit from faster rollouts of new features and improvements, as the company can implement updates more quickly and efficiently.
- Enhanced user experience: With back-end work handled by Weavr, Peanuds can focus squarely on refining UX, and developing innovative tools that address the specific needs of its target customer groups.
- Robust compliance and security. Peanuds can take full advantage of Weavr’s expertise in compliance and security, ensuring that customers’ transactions are safe and fully compliant with all regulatory standards.
The embedded finance impact: what does the future hold?
Peanuds launched its core offering a couple of months ago and is currently in the process of optimising processes and shipping more features. What’s remarkable is just how quickly and cost-effectively the ambitious startup has reached this critical phase in development. What’s more, Florian is in no doubt about the role embedded finance has played in making this happen:
“Embedded finance has saved us two years of non-operational time, plus €1-2 million in license application costs. We have also eliminated the need to have certain legal positions staffed in-house to fulfill license requirements.”
Ambitions for the future include possible services such as lending, and even treasuries or stocks. A modular, open architecture approach means that whatever the future holds, Peanuds can bring it on board.
Find out more…
Embedded finance can help translate your ambitions into a compliant, concrete, product offering quickly and cost-effectively. To see what’s possible, check out the ultimate guide to embedded finance or our solutions page.
