“An entity leaves the payments to be made, whether for customers, for suppliers or for wages, on lists. They print and go around to get the right signatories internally, a double or triple signature, and they fax that to their bank. The bank calls back to validate the origin, then manually encodes all these transactions in its systems and validates them. We can find thousands and thousands of transactions that have gone out of the system, printed, validated on paper, sent by fax and re-encoded… Not all the players work like that, but we were surprised to find this reality.”

More than 20 years and four startups after his debut as an entrepreneur, Mulheims can still be surprised... but still retains the same appetite to develop solutions, in the context of his latest baby, Finologee.

“It can make a real difference in Luxembourg. We have been asking ourselves for years: why is no one tackling this problem? The answer is probably because it is difficult! You have to be a regulated player, get all the agreements with all the players... We started the project in development last year, but we have been preparing it for two and a half years. We did the tour as we did with Digicash in 2011. A new player would most often not have the same economy of scale!" says the Finologee CEO.

Building on its experience and the status of PSF support granted to it by the finance ministry in January 2019, Finologee has also chosen to have its technological infrastructure audited to obtain the label according to the ISO 27001 standard, which certifies operational excellence in IT security.

The group--which achieves an annual turnover of €7m and reinvests on average €2m per year in the development of new products, an area to which it devotes a third of its workforce--has planned an investment of €3m for Enpay, to which the two ministries (economy and finance) have provided financial support via the aid for process and organisational innovation programme.

After three years of reflection and a year of development, Raoul Mulheims, Georges Berscheid, Jonathan Prince and Didier Spick provide a solution to a problem that few players could have tackled. Photo: Finologee

The solution combines advantages: universality, since all the banks connected to the Swift network can be linked to the device; and automation, because it makes it possible to use Luxtrust certificates, but also any other security and identification product, and to rely on business software to automate repetitive payment or reporting tasks.

A first customer, Crédit Agricole Life Insurance Europe, has already adopted this product, while waiting for others to license this customisable solution hosted by Finologee.

This article was originally published in French on Paperjam and has been translated and edited for Delano.