Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
With Camille Tyan, Deputy CEO of Swan and co-founder of Payplug, Numeral and Marble.
Camille Tyan grew up in western Paris. From an early age, he has been driven by creation. His mother worked in lyrical art, his father was an architect, and his brothers are a designer and a musician. In the Tyan family, creativity—whatever form it takes—has always been a way of life. Though passionate about the guitar, Camille’s first creation didn’t come through music but through technology.
At 14, he built his first website for his school—a kind of Street View of the campus, made from photos he had taken with an old digital camera and stored on floppy disks. From that moment on, the idea of creating never left him. What he loved was starting from a blank page and ending up with something tangible. Going from 0 to 1. But before going any further, he decided he had to learn.
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In 2006, Camille moved to Montreal to study engineering at McGill University. His plan was clear: complete his studies, gain experience by working for a few years, then pursue an MBA. While he wasn’t yet certain he wanted to start his own company, he knew one thing for sure—he wanted to be in business.
After four years, the length of a bachelor’s degree in North America, Camille returned to Paris and began his career at the renowned consulting firm McKinsey as a Junior Associate. Two and a half years later, he crossed the Channel to join Google’s strategy team in London. Two great experiences in his pursuit of learning, where he picked up a lesson that still serves him today. “The biggest thing I learned in the first years of my career was making decisions with incomplete information. I realized there’s no right answer. No one has the right answer. Some people might have better intuition, better calculations, or just more luck—usually a mix of all three—that helps them get it right.”
“We’re not inventing something new. […] What we’ve always done in these three companies is focus on the customer experience, ease of use, and ease of integration.”
In 2012, after four years of learning, Camille decided to move to the next step of his plan and enrolled in Harvard to pursue an MBA. It was there that he met Antoine Grimaud, another Frenchman who had come to study in the United States. The two became passionate about payment companies—the term “fintech” hadn’t even been coined yet. PayPal was the reference point, Stripe had just raised its first $18 million round led by Sequoia, and Square was entering a phase of rapid growth, handling around $10 billion in annual payments. “What interested me about payments was the almost imperious aspect of it. There’s this underlying network that enables all these exchanges to work. It’s the oil in the economic engine. Without payments, you can’t have an economy,” Camille explains.
He then decided to build a version of Square—but for Europe. At the time, Square allowed users to turn their smartphones into card readers with a simple magnetic stripe reader. For Camille, the reasoning was straightforward. Either he succeeded, which would be great, or he failed and would call Square to say, “Hey, you don’t want to hire someone in Europe? I know the market very well.” He shared his project with Antoine over lunch at the Harvard cafeteria, and Antoine agreed.
Payplug was born.
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The two young entrepreneurs returned to France, to Paris, and raised €500,000 from business angels. Quickly, they decided to pivot towards e-commerce payments for strategic reasons. The company’s growth was strong. In 2016, Payplug was serving around 6,000 French e-merchants, and had obtained its payment institution license from the ACPR. But competition was becoming fierce, particularly from Stripe and Adyen. In 2016, Stripe raised $150 million and had an estimated transaction volume of $20 billion. Adyen, $90 billion. Payplug, on the other hand, had the opportunity to raise €7 million—a significant amount, but too little to keep up with the competition. What to do? It was during this period of uncertainty that an opportunity arose.
Payplug received an acquisition offer from the BPCE Group (Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Epargne), and Camille and Antoine didn’t hesitate to accept. “In payments, you have to be big. With a large player like them, who is also one of the biggest Visa partners in Europe, we thought it was the right choice. It was a pretty quick exit, but very positive for the founders and shareholders.” The transition went smoothly, and Payplug continued to grow. But after three years, Camille started feeling the urge to create again. He had fallen into a more corporate than entrepreneurial environment, and it no longer suited him. He decided to leave Payplug in 2019 and take a break.
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For a year, Camille wanted to explore something beyond fintech. He took a step back and became a coach and mentor at Entrepreneur First in Paris, where he was introduced to deeptech. But no matter what, what he loved was payments. And it didn’t take long before he returned to it.
In 2020, two things happened. First, Camille crossed paths with Nicolas Benady, who had recently launched Swan to offer white-label financial services. The two knew each other from the early days of Payplug (in France, the fintech world is small, and everyone knows each other), and Nicolas invited him to join the board of Swan to serve as chairman. The second thing was his encounter with eFounders, the famous Parisian startup studio now known as Hexa. It couldn’t have come at a better time, as Camille had been planning to launch his own startup studio in fintech. The chemistry was immediate, and Logic Founders was born.
When launching his fintech startup studio, Camille wanted to capitalize on the lessons learned over the past 10 years. He was full of ideas and challenges he had encountered during his time at Payplug. “I needed a system to connect to SEPA payments for transfers and direct debits, and we had built that ourselves, which was extremely complex. So, I created Numeral with Edouard and Hichem. The second was that we had developed a transaction scoring engine to fight fraud and money laundering, and that’s why we created Marble with Arnaud and Pascal.”
For every project he embarks on, Camille follows a simple recipe (on paper, at least): don’t reinvent the wheel. “We’re not inventing something new. We’re fixing something that’s not working well in a world of giants generating huge profits. We didn’t invent online card payments with Payplug. There were plenty of financial institutions doing transfers and SEPA direct debits before Numeral, and many ways to fight fraud before Marble. What we’ve always done in these three companies is focus on the customer experience, ease of use, and ease of integration.”
Logic Founders lasted for three years, with some major successes, such as Numeral's acquisition by Mambu at the end of last year. But despite the excitement of regularly starting from scratch with new projects, Camille missed continuity and creation. He had ultimately become more of a mentor than a founder. “From the moment these fintechs became independent, raised funds, and were on a different path, I would move on to the next thing, actually.” Camille had become a master of going from 0 to 1, but now he wanted to take things further, from 1 to as far as possible. A bit like when he was at Payplug. And once again, It didn’t take long for an opportunity to present itself. The Swan board and founders, which had been searching for a deputy CEO for several months, offered him the position. Camille accepted.
A few weeks ago, the embedded finance fintech announced a Series B expansion of 42 million euros, led by Eight Roads Ventures. The ambitions are high. Swan plans to accelerate its growth across several European markets, starting with Italy. It also intends to fast-track its product roadmap, particularly focusing on the development of custom card programs to cater to the needs of SMEs. This will be accompanied by the recruitment of 85 additional employees. According to a study by Adyen and BCG, the embedded finance market is currently valued at 185 billion dollars globally, with 72 billion of that in Europe. Swan is determined to play a leading role in this space.
Camille is ready to compose a new vision.
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Thomas