MLabs Helps Two Streamline Business Transactions

Invoicing is an essential, everyday operation for companies across the globe. Two is a payments services provider that offers BNPL (Buy-Now-Pay-Later) services to merchants.

Sure enough, in an interconnected online environment, businesses can spend excessive time onboarding customers and tracking down overdue payments.

Two Checkout addresses this common headache by providing a frictionless checkout process. This means business owners can focus on delivering quality and not stressing over the minutiae of every invoice.

Benefits of Two Checkout:

1. Two Checkout: easy B2B invoicing
2. Merchant BNPL
3. Simple admin
4. 14-90 day payment terms
5. Credit for buyers

Saving the Trees

Visa processes about 597 million transactions a day. In Europe alone, 101.6 billion non-cash payments occur annually. These are impressive figures, so you'd be forgiven for thinking electronic invoicing was as straightforward as possible.

But you'd be wrong.

As Two points out on their website, unneeded difficulties with the typical approach to invoicing leave business owners scratching their heads as they sift through piles of paperwork and misplaced receipts.

Needless to say, many questions need to be answered:

"Why are payments still mailed by paper checks in the US?

Why do almost no European businesses issue their employees with credit cards?

Why do buyers waste so much time finding the tiny subset of suppliers that accept purchases on invoices?

Why do retailers have to finance their business customers' purchases with cash from their balance sheets?

Why does a retailer need to hire credit analysts?"

Traditional Challenges

1. E-commerce and e-payments common
2. Invoicing is still a pain
3. Paper checks in the US
4. Retailers forced to finance business customer - purchases

Preventing Payment Pitfalls

Two CEO Andreas Mjelde realized ahead of the curve that B2B transactions should be as painless as C2B transactions.

However, any solution had to be reliable and secure if supporting major transactions was to be an option. Needless to say, skimmer implants, backdoors, and other exploits - all too common with non-deterministic tech stacks - had to be avoided.

With a powerful type system, Haskell is the go-to technology for building scalable, reliable, and bug-free systems. Haskell is celebrated by industry-leading enterprises for the concise and expressive codebases it underpins.

Financial firms rely on the language to supercharge their high-frequency trading algorithms. Meanwhile, mobile banking platforms and payment providers sleep easy at night knowing Haskell offers several battle-tested features.

1. On-going headache for businesses
2. Security risks: skimmers, backdoors, etc.
3. Haskell: natural choice
4. Finacial firms, mobile banking platforms, payment providers choosing Haskell
5. MLabs: largest Haskell consultancy

MLabs is the largest Haskell consultancy in the world, with an army of over one hundred developers and counting. The consultancy is an experienced innovator within the blockchain space and a leading fintech R&D firm. Boasting an impressive track record, the UK-based corporation was an obvious choice to help build Two Checkout.

Services Employed

Product Design and Technical Specification - MLabs composed a detailed technical plan ensuring an industry-grade implementation

Team Augmentation - MLabs engineers worked closely with the Two management team to build an MVP in exceptional time

Technical Recruitment - MLabs helped Two build a technical team to maintain and develop their invoicing platform once deployed

Collaborating with MLabs

Like with any major release, Two needed a robust design and implementation. MLabs worked closely with the team to establish a secure framework, built to spec and capable of the necessary features.

Product implementation always brings unique challenges, and Two Checkout was no exception. Nevertheless, MLabs engineers ensured the invoicing product provided Two's customers with the reliable service they required.

Partnership Milestones

1. Initial consultation to MVP: 4 months
2. €2.5M Sequoia investment - a 1st in Norway
3. Consistent customer growth
4. Recognition for addressing slow corporate payments

Two and MLabs turned out to be a winning combination. Soon after launch, the Covid pandemic began, and many businesses were caught flat-footed. Almost overnight, e-commerce solutions were no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity to keep merchants afloat. This meant a sudden surge in demand for Two's services, and a reliable product built together with MLabs meant Two quickly realized their ROI.

Development Milestones

1. MLabs and Two went from initial consultation to MVP in 4 months
2. In 2021, MLabs and Two's work caught the eye of Sequoia - a Silicon Valley CV firm expanding into Europe. The firm provided €2.5 million in backing, marking its first investment in Norway.
3. The Two Checkout product successfully tackled and received recognition for addressing slow corporate payments, an outstanding problem for businesses around the globe.

Continuing Progress

These days, Two's growth is robust as they continue acquiring customers across Europe. The fintech startup is helping businesses streamline operations domestically and abroad - and in so doing garnishing headline attention from the likes of TechCrunch and Bloomberg.

Thanks to targeted and expert assistance from MLabs, the company could take advantage of the BNPL model, expanding it beyond Gen Z consumers to include merchants. Sure enough, Two has streamlined the B2B sales process, which had been an unnecessary headache for far too long.