How Liberis Built a Scalable Lending Platform with Formance
Achieving Perfect Reconciliation While Scaling Across 14 Countries
May 6, 2025
We had a clear vision of what we wanted to build but needed guidance to translate it into the platform. The collaboration with Formance was invaluable—whenever we faced a specific challenge, we could ask, ‘How do we best implement this flow in Numscript?’ and get direct, actionable advice from the Formance team.
Company Context
Liberis is an embedded finance platform that helps SMBs access financial services through their everyday business software. They work with payment companies, e-commerce platforms and marketplaces to integrate financial products into their product.
Recently, Liberis launched Flexible Cash Advance, a tailored financing solution that gives eBay sellers fast, transparent access to working capital. Fully embedded in the seller dashboard, it enables merchants to manage cash flow, invest in growth, and track repayments in real time.
eBay Seller Capital Through Flexible Cash Advance, eBay sellers can access working capital to grow their businesses—whether it’s expanding inventory, investing in marketing, or managing seasonal cash flow. This embedded offering integrates seamlessly into the seller's eBay dashboard, providing transparent, real-time updates on available funding and repayment schedules.
Challenges
- Ensuring Financial Data Accuracy
As a lending operator, achieving perfect reconciliation is essential, as any discrepancy between actual money movements and ledger records could result in significant financial losses. Additionally, maintaining customer trust is paramount—merchant clients rely on Liberis to provide absolute confidence in the accuracy of their financial data. - Speed vs. Focus in Product Development
Launching new products exposed inefficiencies in Liberis’s build-or-buy approach. Their engineering team was spending excessive time building basic ledger functionality, instead of focusing on Liberis’s unique value proposition. They needed to balance speed with safety, moving quickly to market while maintaining rigorous financial standards. But most off-the-shelf ledgering solutions were designed for a narrow range of use cases that didn’t fit Libers’s unique funding model. - Scaling Efficiently
The complexity of their payment flows, involving bundled transactions and split mechanisms between multiple partners, makes reconciliation difficult to manage at scale. Expanding to 14 countries with growing transaction volumes, these challenges become more significant. Liberis required a system built to handle this complexity without increasing staff.
Why Formance
The Formance team showcased a deep accounting expertise. From sales to implementation, they clearly understood what it takes to build and run a robust, bespoke accounting system, giving us confidence every step of the way.
Liberis selected Formance over building in-house or other market alternatives because Formance offered several key advantages:
- Lightweight, Fit-for-Purpose Solution → While evaluating solutions, Liberis considered comprehensive core banking platforms but found them too heavy and expensive for their needs. This led them to seek lightweight ledger solutions like Formance.
- The Open Source Approach → Formance’s open-source foundation aligned with Liberis’s strategic priorities, offering code transparency, hosting flexibility, and a built-in exit strategy.
- Proven Expertise of the Formance Team → Our confidence was further reinforced by the interactions between our senior finance team and the Formance team.
- High Technical Flexibility → As a lean, engineer-driven organization, Liberis needed a solution that aligned with their technical expertise, avoiding the complexity of configuration-heavy systems. Numscript allowed them to seamlessly integrate financial operations into their release cycle, saving engineering effort.
- Strong Collaboration → The Liberis team worked closely with the Formance team to co-design the ledger, addressing potential challenges upfront to ensure maximum flexibility and scalability.
Outputs & Strategic Impact
Shifting to Formance lets us concentrate on what truly moves the needle—acquiring more customers and generating more revenue, rather than dealing with mechanical tasks like figuring out how to add a new currency to our payment system.
- Cost saving → Liberis was able to launch their new product without having to hire additional engineering and product staff, saving them money.
- Accelerated time-to-go-live → Building in-house would also have delayed launch, resulting in lost revenue and potential customer partnerships. Liberis’s partners expect them to work on tight schedules, and building on Formance gave them the confidence they could hit important milestones with their high-profile partner (eBay). Liberis was able to go live safely with Flexible Cash Advance in about two and a half months, meeting their partner’s demanding timelines.
- Zero Reconciliation Error → Liberis’s team’s main focus is tracking the absence of negative signals, particularly reconciliation errors. With Formance, they achieved perfect alignment between actual money movements and what the ledger shows so far, with zero reconciliation errors.
- Long-term Growth Enabler → From a strategic perspective, Liberis’s teams can concentrate on what matters most, rather than spending time building infrastructure.
Next Steps & Final Thoughts
My favorite thing about this whole Formance project has been how much closer our treasury and engineering teams have become. Getting this right in a finance company is like a superpower. The level of trust and ability to co-design new products quickly has skyrocketed because we've moved to a system that bridges our worlds effectively. I'm really optimistic about the impact this will have as we develop new products.
Liberis now plans to migrate their flagship product to the Formance ledger. Formance's banking and wallet connectors are key to their scaling strategy, promising significant time and cost savings for their finance team during the migration. We’re proud to support companies like Liberis that are shaping the future of embedded finance, and we can’t wait to see what they build next!