Powens Connects to 350 French Banks Through a Single API. Your Accounting Software Is Charging You €25/Month for That.
Every month, there's a moment French business owners quietly dread. The bank export file. The import into the accounting software. The 150 transaction lines, each waiting to be matched to an invoice. The "VIREMENT SEPA" entry with no description. The €12.50 that nobody can place. The 90 minutes that should have been an evening off.
Your bank has been ready to talk to your accounting software since 2018. The only reason they haven't been introduced is that someone decided to charge you for the introduction.
What PSD2 actually changed
In September 2019, a piece of EU banking regulation called PSD2 — the Payment Services Directive 2 — came into force in France. Article 66 of the Directive requires banks to open their transaction data to any licensed third party that a customer authorizes. Free of charge. Via a standardized connection — meaning software can read your bank transactions automatically, without you downloading a file or manually importing anything.
Powens, formerly Budget Insight, is the company that connected all of this. Now owned by BPCE Group — one of France's two largest banking networks, which includes Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Épargne — Powens covers 350 French banks and financial institutions: not just BNP Paribas and Société Générale, but Crédit Mutuel, CIC, La Banque Postale, regional mutuals, Qonto, and Shine. Every month, your bank sends your transactions automatically to any software that uses Powens' connection. No export. No import. No manual matching.
Sage Business Cloud charges €15-25/month extra for bank sync, through a third-party connection that covers 150 French banks — less than half of what Powens connects. Pennylane includes bank connectivity in their paid subscription, starting at €14/month. The underlying PSD2 connection is legally free. The price you pay is for someone else to use the free connection on your behalf.
The real cost of 90 minutes a month
Manual bank reconciliation costs 90 minutes per month for a typical small business. That's 18 hours per year — two and a half working days — spent exporting files, importing transactions, and manually matching entries to invoices. Every matched transaction you do by hand is one the software could have handled automatically. Every €12.50 mystery transaction you spend 20 minutes tracing is a €12.50 mystery Liberté would have flagged in seconds, without interrupting you.
Those errors matter because the FEC — the Fichier des Écritures Comptables, the standardized accounting file that France's tax authority can demand with 15 days' notice — must include correctly categorized transactions to be compliant. An FEC with systematic miscategorizations is a flag. The Direction Générale des Finances Publiques, France's tax authority, cross-references declared taxable revenue against reconciled bank deposits when selecting TVA audits. Errors that accumulate across months are harder to explain when an inspector asks — not because you did anything wrong, but because the numbers don't line up cleanly.
And the accountant fees. Expert-comptable charges — your annual accounting bill, typically €1,500-3,500/year for a small SARL — are partly based on how much cleanup work arrives at year-end. A business with three months of unreconciled transactions hands their accountant a reconstruction project. A business with clean, automatically matched accounts hands them a verification task. The difference in billable hours is measurable: typically 2-4 hours saved at €80-150/hour.
The irony of paying for free infrastructure
Here's the observation accounting software vendors won't make publicly: PSD2 made automatic bank reconciliation available to every French business in September 2019. Six years later, most accounting software still charges for it as an add-on. A €25/month extra fee to access a connection the bank is legally required to provide free of charge — because the vendor built the integration and decided to sell the access rather than include it.
Powens itself charges software companies a licensing fee for access to its aggregated connections — estimated at €0.10-0.50 per user per month at scale. The €25 you pay Sage for bank sync covers perhaps €0.30 of infrastructure cost and €24.70 of margin. That's the pricing power that comes from making free public infrastructure feel like a premium feature.
Add it up: eliminating a €25/month bank sync add-on saves €300/year. Accountant time saved at year-end — 2-4 hours for a small business with clean reconciliation, at €80-150/hour — saves another €160-600. The 18 hours of manual reconciliation itself, valued at a conservative €50/hour, is €900/year. The total is not a rounding error. It's a deliberate choice made by vendors who benefit from the current system.
What automatic reconciliation actually looks like
Authorize the connection once. Powens links your bank to your accounting software using the PSD2 access your bank is legally required to provide. From that point, every morning your transactions arrive already in your accounts: matched automatically to your invoices and payment records, categorized by transaction type. Month-end reconciliation becomes a review, not a reconstruction. Unusual transactions — a payment with no matching invoice, an amount that doesn't correspond to any expected entry — get flagged for your attention. Everything else is handled.
Liberté includes Powens connectivity in the free platform, covering all 350 French banks. Bank reconciliation is not an add-on. PSD2 made the connection free; Liberté passes that through rather than selling it back.
Consent renewal works automatically every 90 days — PSD2 requires customers to re-authorize bank data access periodically, and Liberté handles the renewal so you don't miss a connection. For businesses that need direct bank communication without going through an aggregator, EBICS — the protocol French banks use for large-volume corporate transfers — is also supported.
One less thing to dread
The monthly reconciliation session that keeps getting pushed to Saturday morning, then Sunday evening, then the weekend after that — the one where you match "VIREMENT SEPA 000847" to an invoice you sent six weeks ago and can't quite remember — that session is optional. It was never a cost of running a business. It was a cost of using software that didn't do the obvious thing.
What happens to those 90 minutes? Nothing dramatic. You don't get them back all at once. You just stop losing them. Saturday morning becomes Saturday. Sunday evening becomes Sunday. Over a year, that's three working days back inside your business instead of inside a spreadsheet — or three evenings you were actually home when dinner was ready.
Banking infrastructure has been ready since 2019. Free, launching Q2 2026 in France. Join the waitlist at liberte.free.