Banyan Infrastructure is a SaaS platform that helps banks, lenders, and developers track, manage, and report on their portfolio of renewable energy infrastructure investments.

Banyan Infrastructure’s mission is to be the single source of truth for the financial performance and health of a renewable energy portfolio. Their platform provides comprehensive and accurate reporting on renewal infrastructure projects, making integrations to core technology stacks a critical component of their product strategy.

Olivia Heitz, a Product Manager who leads Banyan Infrastructure’s integrations team, adds additional context: 

“Our customers use accounting software, CRMs, and other types of systems that each collect and store information that’s relevant to their projects. We needed to integrate these applications with Banyan Infrastructure so that our users can have a holistic view of their portfolio in one platform.”

As their team started to build out integrations themselves, they realized they needed another solution to help scale their integration offerings for current and future customers quickly.

They initially evaluated embedded iPaaS solutions but, according to Olivia, they decided against them because “despite their low-code/no-code branding, embedded iPaaS solutions are highly technical to use and require you to build integrations incrementally, so their time to value is poor.”

Olivia and her team then began looking at unified API solutions, as they’d enable Banyan Infrastructure to offer hundreds of product integrations through a single, aggregated API.

After reviewing several solutions diligently, they quickly landed on Merge.

“Merge offered us the fastest time to launch integrations, covered the key accounting and CRM integrations our prospects and customers needed, and their team was willing and able to provide ample day-to-day technical support,” says Olivia.

The team at Banyan Infrastructure was able to build to Merge’s Unified API within a couple of weeks and take 14 accounting integrations and 21 CRM integrations live, which include Sage Intacct, Xero, Quickbooks Online, Zoho CRM, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

In the case of CRM integrations, they’ve built the following flows:

1. Once a CRM integration is established, the customer maps objects and certain fields with entities (e.g., loan) in Banyan Infrastructure. For instance, a lender could sync an opportunity object in their CRM with a loan in Banyan Infrastructure, along with fields like opportunity amount, closing date, description, owner, etc.

In addition, the customer can use Merge’s Remote Data to sync additional custom fields that extend beyond Merge’s Common Models. 

Olivia explains why this is invaluable: “Our customers’ CRM systems are highly customized, so they often have unique syncing requirements. Remote Data allows all of our customers to sync their custom fields without having to perform additional work.”

2. Customers can then sync data bidirectionally every 24 hours, allowing users to have up-to-date data in both systems. 

Through their accounting integrations, Banyan Infrastructure implemented the following to automatically populate data on the entities created from the CRM integrations:

1. Customers can map journal entries to transactions in Banyan Infrastructure through their accounting systems’ chart of accounts. Moreover, customers use Merge’s Tracking Categories Common Model to map transactions to specific investments and projects in Banyan Infrastructure.

2. Customers can then fetch new transactions every 24 hours in Banyan Infrastructure, which can be pulled into the appropriate entities and used to calculate key financial metrics, like internal rate of return (IRR), multiple on invested capital (MOIC), EBITDA, and many more.

Olivia and her team couldn’t imagine taking the CRM and accounting integrations live as quickly and effectively without Merge. 

“Adding dozens of accounting and CRM integrations would have taken our team months and consumed thousands of engineering hours. Merge enabled us to take these integrations live within weeks and avoid burning out our engineers,” explains Olivia.

Merge’s Integration Observability features have proven to be just as impactful for Olivia and her team.

“Merge’s automated issue detection capabilities have been a game changer for our integration team. We’ve gone from taking weeks to identify, diagnose, and address integration issues to days,” says Olivia.

Finally, Olivia and her team have valued the support they’ve received from Merge’s team. 

According to Olivia: “Our dedicated CSM and integration architect are extremely responsive, knowledgeable about their product and ours, and always willing to get on a call to train our team.” 

So, what’s next in Banyan Infrastructure’s integration journey with Merge? 

“We’re planning on adding payroll integrations to Banyan Infrastructure. The labor costs that can sync over from these systems would roll up into metrics and get added to reports that our customers can share with the federal government, specifically the EPA—to meet the requirements in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund—and lenders.”

We look forward to helping Banyan Infrastructure build these integrations successfully.