By partnering with Inventi, Andaria reduced the estimated internal effort of a direct SEPA connection from 9/10 to 3–4/10 – while gaining more control over the EUR payments at the heart of its business.
At a glance
The challenge: Rising sponsor-bank costs, limited control and an additional compliance decision layer.
The decision: Find a specialist partner rather than occupy Andaria’s limited development capacity with a months-long internal build.
The solution: Direct SEPA access through the Bank of Lithuania’s CENTROlink, delivered via Inventi’s Payment Gateway.
The outcome: A stable production setup, growing EUR payment volumes and a significantly lighter technical workload for Andaria’s team.
A direct SEPA project that started with a late-night LinkedIn scroll
The partnership between Andaria and Inventi began in a rather ordinary way: Andaria’s Head of Product, Kenneth Psaila, could not sleep and opened LinkedIn.
By then, Kenneth had already been exploring direct SEPA connectivity. Another potential provider had left him waiting days for replies and wondering what support would look like once the connection was live.
Then an Inventi ad appeared.
“I don’t use LinkedIn that much, but the notification came up and I thought: let’s see what this is. I sent a message, someone from Inventi replied quickly, and the whole story went from there.”
Sometimes an infrastructure project starts with a lengthy procurement process. This one started with a message sent from bed.
Why SEPA matters to Andaria
Founded in 2019 and regulated in Malta and the United Kingdom, Andaria provides business payment accounts, embedded finance and card programme solutions. Its platform supports corporate payments, multi-currency accounts and access to local and international payment networks.
For Andaria, SEPA is not a secondary capability. Most of its customers operate in Europe, and a significant share of their payments is denominated in euros.
Some use Andaria to process salaries. Others move funds between their Andaria accounts and accounts held elsewhere. In both cases, waiting several days for a euro payment to arrive is not a workable option.
That made direct SEPA access a priority. And one of the few infrastructure projects Andaria deliberately fast-tracked.
When sponsored access became limiting
Before going direct, Andaria routed its SEPA payments through a sponsor bank.
The arrangement provided access to the market, but it also brought two increasingly important constraints.
The first was cost. As a smaller financial institution, Andaria did not yet process the volumes required to negotiate the same rates as much larger players.
The second was control.
Andaria performed its own onboarding, risk and transaction checks, but every payment still passed through the sponsor bank’s separate compliance framework. A payment Andaria considered acceptable could still be rejected further down the route.
“We were very dependent on the sponsor bank. You couldn’t always guarantee that a payment was going to be processed.”
Direct participation offered Andaria a way to remove that additional decision layer and take greater ownership of its euro payment operations.
Why Andaria decided not to build in-house
Andaria briefly considered building the Bank of Lithuania connection internally.
The discussion did not last long.
With a limited development team, assigning engineers to a three-to-five-month infrastructure project would have stalled other product work. The complexity of the Bank of Lithuania documentation made the size of that commitment even clearer.
“If we were going to do the whole integration ourselves, the effort would have been a nine out of ten. With Inventi on board, it took us more like a three or four.”
Andaria integrated with Inventi’s APIs and webhooks. Inventi handled the wider infrastructure layer, including collecting the required keys from the Bank of Lithuania and preparing the environment.
That removed several steps from Andaria’s side and allowed its developers to focus on integrating a small number of interfaces rather than learning and building the entire connectivity stack.
Kenneth also highlights Inventi’s operational interface as one of the strongest parts of the solution:
“The interface is really good and very easy to follow.”
A fast implementation – with honest lessons along the way
Kenneth describes the early commercial and contracting stages as smooth. The teams discussed pricing, found a structure that worked for both sides and moved quickly into implementation.
The project was not completely friction-free, but any issues that arose were addressed quickly through close cooperation between both teams.
Even so, he rates the overall onboarding experience a solid 8 out of 10.
A major reason was how much of the infrastructure work Inventi absorbed.
“You took care of collecting the keys from the Bank of Lithuania, setting up the environment and starting the connectivity immediately. If we had needed to handle all of that ourselves, it would have taken much longer.”
What changed after go-live
Once the connection reached production, the setup proved stable and reliable in day-to-day operations.
Kenneth says Andaria has experienced no significant issues attributable to Inventi since go-live. EUR payment volumes through the new setup are increasing, existing customers are gradually being migrated, and Andaria has begun issuing its own IBANs as part of the transition.
The migration is still underway, particularly for corporate customers whose account structures take more time to change. That means the full commercial impact will continue to build as more volume moves onto the direct route.
Operationally, however, the result is already clear: Andaria has a stable direct SEPA setup without having diverted its development team into building and maintaining the full infrastructure internally.
“We’re quite happy with how the process went and how the volumes are increasing. At the moment, there are no issues.”
For Andaria, the value of the partnership was not only the connection Inventi delivered. It was everything the company no longer had to build around it.
About Andaria
Andaria provides regulated business payment accounts, embedded finance and card programme solutions to companies operating across multiple markets. The group was founded in 2019 and operates through regulated entities in Malta and the United Kingdom.
About Inventi
Inventi helps licensed PSPs, EMIs and banks connect directly to SEPA through CENTROlink and EKS, with SWIFT and TARGET Services available through one Payment Gateway API.
