SNCF Connect & Tech, the digital subsidiary of French rail operator SNCF, has launched Tesmo Business Mobility, a SaaS platform for managing employee travel expenses and commuting costs (SNCF). The solution combines expense management software with physical and virtual payment cards issued through French BaaS provider Swan, targeting SMEs that want to centralize mobility spending in one place. SNCF Connect & Tech operates under the Tesmo brand, which it created in April 2025 to sell digital mobility solutions to businesses and regional authorities.
Tesmo Business Mobility handles both daily commuting and business travel expenses. Employees receive a dedicated payment card (physical or virtual) that managers can activate for specific trips, eliminating expense reports and out-of-pocket spending. The platform includes a simulator that helps employees identify which mobility subsidies they're eligible for, covering everything from public transport season tickets to France's Forfait Mobilités Durables (sustainable mobility allowance), accommodation, taxis, and meal expenses. For companies, everything gets centralized on one platform with automatic receipt capture and full visibility into travel spending.
Why SNCF Built This
SNCF Connect & Tech positions this as solving a real operational problem. According to Julia Mason, Director of Strategy and Transformation at SNCF Connect & Tech, "employee mobility combines organizational, regulatory, financial, and managerial challenges," and most existing tools force companies to juggle multiple systems for commuting subsidies, business travel booking, and expense management. The company points to data showing 80% of French workers still use personal vehicles for work trips, suggesting there's room to shift behavior toward public transport and sustainable mobility if the administrative friction gets removed.
What's interesting here is that SNCF Connect & Tech dogfooded this internally first. The company tested Tesmo Business Mobility with its own 1,300 employees before launching it externally, which gave them real operational feedback and let them work out integration issues in-house.
The platform is white-label and customizable, which means companies can brand it and configure policies around their specific travel and commuting rules. Beyond expense management and card programs, Tesmo Business Mobility includes travel booking functionality, positioning it more directly against integrated travel and expense platforms like Navan and SAP Concur. SNCF Connect & Tech is targeting SMEs and mid-sized companies that haven't yet invested in dedicated travel and expense management tools, though it's not entirely clear how large that market segment actually is given the established competition.
The Swan Infrastructure Choice
The payment cards in Tesmo Business Mobility are issued through Swan, a French Banking-as-a-Service provider. Swan operates as the regulated e-money institution behind the service, handling card issuance, payment processing, KYC, and AML compliance. For Swan, this represents significant validation. SNCF Connect & Tech isn't a small startup experimenting with embedded finance; it's the digital arm of one of France's largest state-owned enterprises, with 1,300 employees and the operational complexity that comes with managing business travel at scale.
Swan has raised over €95 million from investors including Lakestar, Accel, Creandum, and Bpifrance since launching in 2019. The company holds an e-money license from France's ACPR and operates across multiple European markets. Partnerships like this one show that VC-backed BaaS providers can win enterprise deals and handle the regulatory and operational requirements that come with serving large organizations, even if the brand launching the product is technically a subsidiary rather than the parent company itself.
