Jan 04, 2023 
Accounting software service providers, like Dougs, have found an incredible niche: simplifying the daily life of entrepreneurs. But well before the arrival of PSD2, Dougs had a feeling that integrating Open Banking capabilities into their solutions would make a big impact on their 10,000+ customers—and they were right. So they looked to Powens to help them do this. Since then, Dougs has taken its offering to the next level to provide an ultra-efficient accounting service that its customers love.
Being able to sychronize business bank accounts gives Dougs a competitive advantage
Dougs taps into the power of our Bank (account aggregation product) to sync their software with their customers’ business (or professional) bank accounts and securely access pertinent banking data. This enables them to automatically generate accounting entries and also maintain an up-to-date KPI dashboard for each of its customers’ accounts.
As a result, Dougs’ accountants can now build balance sheets more effectively and accurately than ever before—able to process six times the number of balance sheets than a traditional accounting firm (not using Open Banking technology). This has led to a variety of competitive advantages for Dougs, including charging fees four to five times less than traditional firms while also freeing up accountants’ time to provide customers with personalized service and helpful advice.
- >> To learn more, check out the customer success story we created with Dougs.
However, there were a number of other factors that made the partnership between Dougs and Powens a perfect match. Let’s take a closer look:
Regulatory improvements
1. SCA renewal extension
In April 2022, the Open Banking world received some long-awaited news: the arrival of the SCA (Secure Customer Authentication) renewal extension. The benefit here for Dougs customers is that they now only had to reauthenticate their bank account connections every 180 days—instead of every 90 days under past regulations. This has ensured even greater continuity of service, less downtime (while customer reauthenticated), and an overall smoother customer experience.
In fact, Dougs played a key role in encouraging the EBA (European Banking Authority) to make this change by responding to our call for support in favor of the extension. We are incredibly grateful for Dougs partnership in mobilizing with us in this effort.
2. Improved connector availability and stability
Our team has worked extensively with regulators and banks over the years to implement PSD2 in France. In fact, as soon as the first APIs were made available by banks, Powens (then Budget Insight) was the first player to offer account aggregation by API. This has a lot to do with the agility of our team and our products. As soon as a new API is released or a new regulatory measure is put into action, we’re able to respond immediately.
For Dougs, this has meant having access to more reliable and more structured data than ever before. In the past, they faced a number of data inconsistencies that could have had a directly negative impact on customer accounting.
Powens improvements
3. Bank
We are constantly working to make our Bank product and our connectors best-in-class within the industry. For example, synchronizing bank account data requires us to keep a close eye on our connectors at all times, so that our team can intervene immediately whenever even the slightest issue arises. For Dougs, this has led to a 33% reduction in disconnectivity rate.
- >> Want to learn more? Check out our technical documentation.
4. Webhooks
We’ve recently changed our focus from “push” versus “pull” logic. What this means for Dougs is that now we push data directly to the Dougs app automatically using webhooks instead of them having to fetch it manually. This has led to a boost in productivity and significant time savings for the Dougs team. Not to mention, it eliminates the potential for error caused by manual data pulling.
5. Webview and Console
We launched Webview: a highly visual and user-friendly interface enabling your customers to have clear line of sight around each step of the (bank account) connection journey—with each step being supported by a positive “reassurance” confirmation message. One of the primary goals of creating this improved user flow was to ensure the highest conversion rates possible. For this reason, we continue to test and refine the experience regularly.
Before Webview was made available, Dougs used “screens” developed in-house to keep users moving through the connection journey. Unfortunately, this required a significant amount of development work and ongoing maintenance from their team. Now, they rely solely on a customized version of Webview—based on their specific use case—and have a greater sense of confidence that everything is working correctly at all times.
In parallel, we also launched Console: a dashboard providing real-time operating status for our products (but specifically for our Bank product in the case of Dougs). Thanks to Console, the Dougs team now has an accurate view of:
- Connection status: Both the Dougs team and their customers know the status of the connection with a bank account at all times. For example, if there’s a malfunction with a bank’s API of any kind, both parties receive a notification to avoid any service disruptions as it relates to the aggregation of bank account data.
- Changelogs: This gives the Dougs team complete visibility over the latest banks added to Powens’ Bank product in France and across Europe as well as pertinent details around product improvements and bug fixes.>> Pro-tip: We provide changelogs for each of our products.
Having worked with the Dougs team since 2015, they have easily become one of our most trusted partners over time. It’s actually one of the reasons why we identified “accounting” as one of our first B2B use cases for Open Banking to begin with. We couldn’t be more proud to have helped Dougs’ accountants take their accounting expertise to the next level, giving them more (and better) ways to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses and succeed—now and for years to come.
