Defacto partners with Mambu to expand SME financing

By Milan Rojan

Defacto has partnered with Mambu to support payment operations for its receivables financing programme, as the French B2B lending platform has sought to strengthen its infrastructure for institutional partnerships.

Defacto has gone live on Mambu Payments with SEPA connectivity, enabling the FinTech to automate payment disbursements and repayments while meeting operational and regulatory requirements. The implementation has also provided real-time visibility across payment flows through a single REST API.

Jordane Giuly, CEO and Co-Founder of Defacto, said: “Mambu Payments allowed us to focus our engineering efforts on delivering value for our customers rather than building and maintaining complex banking connectivity.”

Rather than developing and maintaining direct bank integrations, Defacto has used Mambu Payments to connect its existing institutional banking relationship to its payment operations. This approach has allowed the FinTech to retain its existing banking arrangements while adding an automated payments layer.

Mambu has said the infrastructure has been designed to provide a more flexible alternative to traditional Banking-as-a-Service models, which can require FinTechs to establish new accounts through a provider’s banking partner.

Defacto has financed more than$1.74 billion for over 25,000 SMEs across five European markets since launching in 2021. The company has progressed from initial product scoping with Mambu in July 2025 to a beta launch in November 2025, before moving the solution into production in January 2026.

Victor Mithouard, VP Payments and Strategy at Mambu, has said API-first infrastructure has become increasingly important as financial institutions have adopted embedded finance. He has added that automating payment connectivity has enabled FinTechs to deploy lending programmes more efficiently while scaling institutional relationships.

The partnership has highlighted the growing role of API-based payment infrastructure in embedded finance, particularly as regulated FinTechs have sought to expand lending products without developing bespoke banking integrations.