inFakt has launched a business banking solution integrated into its existing accounting service, with UniCredit as the bank behind it. inFakt is a Kraków-based online accounting firm founded in 2008 that combines its own invoicing and bookkeeping software with a dedicated accountant for sole traders and small companies across Poland. Visma has been its majority shareholder since the end of 2020.
What inFakt's account has in common with other accounting tools
Much of inFakt's account looks like what accounting tools across Europe already offer: founders who register their business through inFakt open the account in the same flow, pay taxes and supplier invoices from the app with biometric confirmation, and get currency accounts and a Mastercard. The road there is familiar too, as inFakt frames the launch as the next step in almost ten years of combining accounting, banking and payments, from tax payments in the app to an account information (AIS) licence and its own payment gateway.
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Where the Polish market makes it different
The differences start with Poland's infrastructure: inFakt registers with the Polish business register (CEIDG) through its own connection to the ministry and adds the new account number to the application. Supplier invoices arrive through Poland's national e-invoicing system (KSeF) and can be paid in one click; the card carries the company's tax number (NIP), and Poland's mobile payment system BLIK is planned for November.
Then there is the VAT account (rachunek VAT). Polish split payment rules attach one to every business account in złoty. When a customer pays this way, the VAT portion lands in a ring-fenced account that can only be used to pay VAT to the tax office or to suppliers, unless the tax office agrees to release the money. inFakt's VAT account pays 2% interest, which inFakt says makes it, to its knowledge, the only one of its kind in Poland.
Why inFakt needed a bank rather than an e-money institution
Many accounting tools across Europe build their business accounts on an e-money institution offering banking-as-a-service (e.g. fellow Visma company Accountable with Swan), but inFakt has gone with a bank instead. That may seem unusual, but many banking-as-a-service providers don't operate in Poland at all or offer no localised product. The VAT account adds complexity: it must follow the Polish rules described above, only banks and credit unions can open one, and e-money institutions cannot pay interest on it.
That explains a bank, but the bank's name made me look twice. UniCredit is the group that bought the Polish banking-as-a-service provider Vodeno and the Belgian Aion Bank from private equity firm Warburg Pincus, a deal I covered at the time. Together they offered banking-as-a-service across Europe, with Vodeno as the technology provider and Aion Bank as the licensed institution. The bank named in inFakt's terms, UniCredit NV/SA, is in fact Aion Bank under its new name, with the same Belgian company number. So inFakt's account runs on the very banking-as-a-service business UniCredit bought: the licence is the former Aion Bank's, and Vodeno, based in Poland itself, is the obvious candidate for the technology underneath.
