How Fintecture uses Forest Admin as the central hub for Operations across Teams
Executive Summary
- Fintecture is a payment institution regulated by the ACPR (Banque de France). The company provides bank transfer payment solutions and is used by renowned businesses and institutions such as Leroy Merlin, Edenred, Auchan Retail, and Bricoman.
- Fintecture was looking for an admin panel solution because they preferred to allocate developer resources to their core products. They chose Forest Admin because it offered the best data security and privacy.
- Forest Admin is currently used by most of Fintecture's teams, including Customer Support, Customer Success, KYC, Fraud Management, Product, and Tech. This centralizes customer data and eliminates the need to buy extra SaaS software for different teams.
About Fintecture
Fintecture is a B2B-focused payment solution provider with a mission to simplify and secure payment processes. The company empowers businesses by offering faster, more secure, and cost-effective payment solutions for bank transfers, payment collection, reconciliation, BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later), and more.
Fintecture's innovative payment solutions have established the company as an industry leader, catering to a diverse clientele including Leroy Merlin, Edenred, Auchan Retail, and Bricoman. Fintecture has also created its own fraud management solution, seamlessly integrated into its current payment solutions.
We have recently interviewed Mathilde Persillon, the Director of Customers and Bastien Blanc, the VP of Engineering, who gave us insights on how Fintecture uses Forest Admin as the central hub for customer operations.
What Made Fintecture Look for an Admin Panel Solution
As a payment institution regulated by the ACPR (Banque de France) and licensed to process and acquire funds on behalf of merchants, Fintecture required a secure and reliable back-office solution from day one. According to Bastien Blanc, the Head of Engineering at Fintecture, the team chose to prioritize the development of their core products and minimize the time and development resources spent on building an internal back office.
One of the main focuses of Fintecture was to avoid spending time on building a back-office and to use external tools like Forest Admin instead. It was the only admin panel solution that didn’t access customer data, which was a non-negotiable requirement for us, a regulated payment institution. - said Bastien Blanc, the Head of Engineering at Fintecture.
Forest Admin provided Fintecture with all the benefits of a SaaS low-code solution without any compromise on data security and privacy. Currently, Forest Admin is available in either hybrid (self-hosted) or fully cloud version, depending on the customers' preferences.
How Fintecture Uses Forest Admin
Initially, Fintecture needed to give their non-dev team members access to data stored in the database. Since 2019, their business operations have expanded, leading to increased usage of Forest Admin in line with the growing needs and team size. Forest Admin has been adopted by various teams, giving all of them instant access to the right customer data and the building blocks for necessary tools to manage the data.
Customer Support
Customer Support at Fintecture relies heavily on Forest Admin to perform various operations. It can be investigating a payment, changing the payment's status, activating a new bank account or one of many other tasks that need to be done on a daily basis.
Custom Actions
Everything starts with Custom Actions - one of the most important building blocks Forest Admin provides in order to customize an admin panel. Actions are tools to modify the data exactly the way it makes sense for each use case. They are built or modified by the Tech team before a new or modified workflow is implemented.
Workspaces & Dashboards
Workspaces are custom-built no-code interfaces that allow to have a centralized access to the data and tools to modify it on one screen. Thanks to that, Fintecture's Customer Support team solves the tickets and performs other tasks efficiently. They don't need to switch between different tabs or to search for specific data, which saves them a lot of valuable time.
Fintecture also takes advantage of custom dashboards to visualize the data and keep track of KPIs. They integrated Metabase charts into their Forest Admin dashboard to have all the necessary information on one screen.
Collaboration
The Support team extensively uses Approval Workflows and Notes. While any team member can perform basic data manipulation tasks, some actions, like changing a payment status that overrides a technical status requires an approval because Fintecture considers it as a sensitive action.
Team members also leave notes and tag other people, and managers can always access Activity logs on the project level as well as on the individual account level.
Collaboration tools are available on Forest Admin out-of-the box, and no coding skills are required to set them up.
Inbox
Fintecture is soon going to start using the newest feature on Forest Admin - the Inbox that will allow team leaders to define how to automatically route records to operators and create a queue of them. It will eliminate the guesswork of what to choose and make sure that each task is assigned to one person at a time. Read more about Inbox.
KYC
A similar set of Forest Admin's features is also used by the KYC team. Know Your Customer is an essential process at Fintecture. To activate each new client, the company is required to review the documents and information in order to comply with the strict regulations required for a payment institution regulated by ACPR.
Forest Admin's Custom Actions allowed Fintecture to build a workflow that gives the KYC team access to the right data along with action buttons, for example, to approve or suspend a company. Thanks to Forest Admin, Fintecture didn't need to build an internal app for that - it was enough to add Custom Actions to the existing back office application. The alternative would be to allocate the development resources to build a KYC tool or to buy and maintain another software.
Just like Customer Support, the KYC team at Fintecture has its own set of Workspaces, they use Approval Workflows and will soon start using the Inbox.
Fraud Management
Another Fintecture's team that relies on Forest Admin is the one responsible for Fraud Management. All payment-related data is centralized on one screen. When analysts receive an alert about a suspicious transaction, they go to Forest Admin and react accordingly after verifying the transaction - either confirming it's fraudulent or a false alert.
Fraud analysts have their own Custom Actions, Workspaces, Dashboards, and Approval Workflows. Thanks to Forest Admin, they avoid having lots of tabs open and switching between them.
Tech
At Fintecture, the team members who use Forest Admin include several developers. They handle security features, and create custom actions, fields, and relationships between database models as needed by the business teams. Forest Admin offers developer features like multiple environments and branches to ensure a smooth developer experience.
Before implementing a new process, Fintecture maps its operations, and the tech team builds the required Custom Actions.
Forest Admin is also used by other teams such as Product and Customer Success. They rely on it whenever they need to learn more about customers, their needs, and interactions with different Fintecture's products and services. Each team has its own set of actions and workspaces, of which Fintecture has built over twenty in total.
The most important thing in customer operations is to have a place where you have all the data centralized and where you can both investigate and take actions. Forest Admin saves our teams a lot of clicks and switching between tabs, making our work very efficient. - said Mathilde Persillon.