If your platform is meant to simplify financial management, banking cannot live outside it. For Freedom Group, embedded payments and real-time financial data were a prerequisite for delivering true digitalisation – with Open Payments as the right infrastructure partner in place.
When you consolidate accounting firms across an entire country, complexity follows. Different clients. Different industries. Different levels of financial maturity. For Freedom Group, the answer has not been to standardise everything, but to support local firms while building shared digital infrastructure through their platform Bflow.
“We acquire and consolidate accounting firms across Sweden,” says Tuva Palm, Head of Product and Technology at Freedom Group. “The firms remain relatively self-governing, but we support them with IT security, regulatory compliance and digitalisation – areas that can be difficult for smaller firms to manage on their own.”
The primary mission is to build software that helps these firms automate workflows and give their end customers a modern, intuitive financial experience. But to do that, banking can't live outside the system.
A fragmented financial reality
Freedom Group's customer base represents a broad cross-section of Swedish businesses: micro-companies, growing SMEs, local retailers, forestry owners, e-commerce players with international sales, and larger group structures.
“The needs differ enormously,” Tuva explains. “Many of these companies don't have a dedicated finance function. They rely on their accounting consultant.”
Before integrating with Open Payments, financial data and payments lived in separate environments. Accounting in one system. Payments in the bank. Status updates somewhere else.
“For a smaller business owner, that can create stress and uncertainty. Has the invoice been paid? What does the balance actually look like right now? You had to log into one app, then another. It wasn't cohesive.”
One place to approve, pay and understand
Freedom Group wanted their end customers to be able to approve and pay invoices directly inside Bflow, without leaving the platform to log into their bank separately. “When we evaluated providers, it was surprisingly hard to find someone who could actually support that,” Tuva says. “We wanted our customers to pay supplier invoices directly from the accounting software, without having to go to the bank to sign afterwards.”
Building direct integrations with individual banks would have been too resource-intensive and difficult to maintain. Instead, Freedom Group chose to partner with Open Payments as their banking infrastructure provider.
Today, supplier invoices can be viewed, approved and paid within a few clicks in Bflow. Salaries, reimbursements and other outgoing payments follow the same embedded logic. When a payment is executed, balances and transaction data are updated in real time.
“After paying an invoice, the customer immediately sees the updated balance in the app. That real-time feedback is important,” Tuva notes.
But the value extends beyond execution. Freedom Group also combines payment data with liquidity analysis tools inside Bflow, helping companies better understand their financial position and make informed decisions.
Supporting both consultants and end customers
For Freedom Group, integration is not only about convenience for business owners. It also transforms the consultant's workflow.
“Both the end customer and the consultant have the financial information in one place,” Tuva explains. “The consultant doesn't need to log into the bank separately either. Everything can be handled within the same system.”
Given that the majority of Swedish companies are small businesses without an internal finance department, this unified view becomes essential.
“For small businesses, having payments and financial data in one place is critical, and in a way that's easy to understand. It's a big part of enabling business owners to steer their company finances,” says Tuva.
Building something together for the future
Implementing deeply embedded payments requires close collaboration. Open Payments works alongside Freedom Group not only on API functionality, but also in dialogue with banks to ensure that integrations function as intended.
“When you're building something from the ground up, the partnership has to work. No one has really done this in our segment before, so we've developed parts of this together,” Tuva explains. Looking ahead, Tuva sees increasing expectations from both business owners and consultants. For Freedom Group, embedding payments and real-time financial data inside Bflow is part of building that future.
“There will be higher and higher demands on integrated systems. As digital expectations rise, especially among small businesses used to seamless consumer apps, fragmented financial workflows become harder to justify. I'm glad we're already on the right path.”
