French startup Qonto has raised another $11.3 million (€10 million) from existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven Capital. The company is now also open for business. You can now create a French business bank account on the company’s website.
Qonto wants to become the N26 of business accounts. While retail banking hasn’t changed quickly enough over the past few years, it feels like business banking is even worse and has been stuck in the past. Everything is too expensive and it takes too much time to tell your bank to do something.
Qonto wants to put you in charge of your account. It’s a web and mobile service like the ones you’re using every day, and you remain in control. So for €9 per month, you get a MasterCard, a French current account with an IBAN to receive payments and the ability to manage transfers and debits.
But that’s just the beginning as you can order new cards for €5 per month or create virtual cards for €2 per month. Qonto lets you manage your user base. If you hire a new sales person, you can give them a physical card and let them access their transactions in the mobile app and on the site.
You can block and unblock your card from the app, change the PIN code and get real-time notifications for each transaction. Administrators can adjust card limits and share transaction information with accountants.
Other features are coming soon, such as an easy workflow to upload receipts and attach them to a particular expense — accountants are going to love this. Qonto will also make it easier to handle transfers in multiple currencies.
In the future, you’ll be able to connect your Qonto account with various fintech services you might also be using, such as Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless. This way, you’ll be able to monitor and manage payments on all sorts of platforms from a single, unified interface.
Behind the scene, Qonto partnered with Treezor for the back end. Treezor is the company that is actually managing your money. It generates current accounts and debit cards for Qonto. On the other side of the equation, Qonto tailors the experience and handles the relationship with its own customers.
Other companies, such as iBanFirst in France, Seed in the U.S. and Tide in the U.K. are working on similar services with a few differences here and there — Tide just announced a $14 million funding round yesterday. While the market seems fragmented, those big funding rounds indicate that there seems to be a big opportunity to replace those expensive and ineffective business bank accounts.
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