The Company
Kadonation is a fast-growing scale-up in the corporate gifting industry. What started as a quick and easy way to pool together with friends for a group gift, eventually grew into a full-fledged, intuitive corporate gifting solution with carefully curated, high-quality gifts. Today, Kadonation caters to hundreds of businesses and thousands of individuals in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Their corporate gifting platform, Kadonation Select, allows businesses to set up reminders and automated flows, allocate budgets and set up approval policies, and stay in control using invoices and order overviews.
The Story
Back in 2014, founder and CEO Fabrice Guillermin had to collect money for a friend’s birthday gift. That process was cumbersome to say the least. Fabrice had to advance payments, send out multiple reminders, and find the right gift - a lot more than he had bargained for. That’s where the idea was born to build a platform to make it easy to collect money with friends, family, and colleagues.
Fast forward to 2017, and Kadonation successfully completed its first major capital round. In 2018 they started focusing on their own corporate gifting features with the versatile Kadonation Gift Card. This card quickly proved an overwhelming success, and prompted the company to start investigating a full-scale gifting solution for corporations.
The Idea
It quickly became apparent that their large ambitions to build a full-fledged corporate gifting platform would come with equally large challenges. Corporate buyers have vastly different requirements than groups of friends or colleagues. One of the key decision criteria turned out to be the integration with the customer’s HR platform.
Companies want seamless onboarding of their employees for any new product they deploy across the organization. Additionally, they want these products to stay in sync whenever they hire new employees or have to let go of existing ones. An added benefit of syncing with HRIS platforms is you have the employee’s birthday in case you’d like to send them a gift.
The Solution
When Kadonation decided to build its first HR integration, they noticed that many customers were using different HR platforms, depending on the size of their workforce or their geographical location. And so they started looking for alternatives to cover the multitude of HR tools out there.
Before long, they decided to work with a Unified API platform to cover the breadth of the different HRIS products out there. When selecting a vendor, Guillermin put out three major decision criteria: privacy compliance, flexible pricing and local HRIS coverage. As a European business, Kadonation has to abide by the GDPR, and their team, as well as their Data Protection Officer, appreciated Apideck’s no-data-storage approach. “Once we had decided on privacy, flexibility and local coverage being our three most important decision factors, going with Apideck was a no-brainer,” says Guillermin.
The Results
As soon as Kadonation completed its vendor due diligence, the team got to work building their first integration on the platform. Since Kadonation operates locally in the EU, Apideck added two additional local HR connectors to the Unified HRIS API as part of the agreement. This way, Kadonation could serve its local customers as well.
In less than a month, the team had its first integration ready for testing. All of its HR integrations went live another two months later. A couple of months of testing led Kadonation to the conclusion that their sync frequency was too high. By lowering the sync frequency to once a week, Kadonation was able to realize substantial savings on their bills, thanks to Apideck’s usage-based billing.
Today, over 10% of Kadonation’s customer base connects with both local platforms like SDWorx, Officient, and AFAS, as well as larger international platforms like Workday and SAP SuccessFactors.
Once we had decided on privacy, flexibility and local coverage being our three most important decision factors, going with Apideck was a no-brainer
