Intelligence allows the opportunity to offer smarter, more personalised, and efficient financial services that improve user experiences, mitigate risks, and provide valuable data-driven insights. Elsewhere, as the cost of living crisis – akin to rocketing inflation rates – leads more and more consumers to rethink their finances, embedded solutions will prove vital as they provide more feasible options. Legacy financial institutions are adapting to this change, working with companies using embedded finance technologies and helping to create more tailored finance solutions. Taking out a credit card and entering the number is a friction point that can cause consumers to abandon a digital purchase. Embedded payments make this process easier by connecting and saving a payment method for later use at the click of a button. The Starbucks app, for example, saves credit or debit card information for 1-click payments while customers earn points for using the app.

The former reduce the time required to launch a compliant and wholistic embedded lending product. Instead, leaders in this space are putting the technology first, weaving themselves into their customer’s workflow. After years of growth, however, the embedded finance ecosystem has finally reached a critical mass — giving us just enough pieces to glimpse the finished puzzle. The path to a lucrative embedded finance proposition requires the proactive definition of an institution’s strategic ambition, a willingness to innovate, and appetite to invest significant capital ahead of the curve. FinTechs, and technology overall, are at the heart of the embedded finance revolution.

How banks are staking a claim in the embedded finance ecosystem

This process was all about the “great unbundling” — taking individual features of traditional finance and rebuilding them from the ground up as individual companies. This concept takes many of those same financial services and embeds them directly into a non-financial workflow. Several companies have already embraced embedded payments to enhance their customer experience.

Embedded finance is a game-changer in the world of FinTech, revolutionizing the way we access and use financial services. By seamlessly integrating payments, lending, insurance, and investment into non-financial platforms, embedded finance enhances customer convenience and opens up new opportunities for businesses to monetize their services. As the industry continues to evolve, we can expect increased accessibility, enhanced personalization, and the integration of blockchain and cryptocurrency to shape its future. With the examples provided, it’s clear that embedded finance is already making a significant impact across various industries. Build a Digital Team
Digital transformation within a bank is driven by people rather than technology. To enable financial services to run seamlessly on nonfinancial platforms, banks may need to internally adopt this agile culture in some way, at least within the team responsible for running embedded finance.

Where does embedded finance present the most value for financial services providers?

As these businesses add new capabilities to their technology stacks, growing relationships beyond payments allows them to create deeper client relationships and new revenue streams. By enabling embedded finance, Fiserv is allowing these businesses to tap into a suite of financial products that can be leveraged to create stickier and more valuable relationships with merchants. Merchants, in turn, benefit from faster access to capital and the ability to simplify and consolidate their business’ financial experience through a single provider. Embedded finance brings financial services to the exact moment it’s needed, instead of being an entirely separate part of a consumer’s life. As a result, there are many different types of embedded finance products and services. The most common examples of embedded finance include fintech, banking, payments, credit cards, lending, investing, and insurance.

Using Plaid Transfer, companies can seamlessly offer embedded payments by authorizing customers, analyzing risk, and moving money with a single API. Companies have various ways to embed digital insurance options, most via partnerships with fintech companies. These fintech companies build insurance options into the checkout flow, enabling consumers to choose insurance as an ‘add-on’ to their purchase. In both examples, embedded banking is designed to increase platform loyalty through a convenient user experience and special rewards. When a Lyft driver has a Lyft checking account that gets them paid faster, it’s less likely they’ll also drive for Uber.

What does it take to win in embedded finance?

Embedded investing allows non-investment service companies to offer investment options that enhance customer experience and open additional avenues of revenue for companies. Traditionally, investing required consumers to open a new account with a legacy financial institution, like Fidelity or Goldman Sachs. Embedded lending allows companies of any size to easily offer their customers more payment options. This is great for consumers, who often prefer to split payments up over time, and for companies looking to increase sales and customer engagement. For ages, companies have either had their employees use personal cards for business expenses or provided them with a company credit card from their bank.

• Embedded insurance at the in-store checkout is nothing new, but fintech has facilitated its spread to digital marketplaces.
• The plurality of BNPL2usage (40 percent) displaces credit cards, and a further 29 percent of consumers say they use it instead of debit cards or cash.
• Existing indicators of shifting trust and wallet deployment across various channels already provide clear markers for payment providers and retailers.
• Platforms have the chance to maximize retention and unlock new revenue streams for relatively low costs.
• Although the opportunities embedded finance provides by increasing convenience to the end user and expanding revenue streams for the financial institutions that power the products, embedded finance complicates a company’s ecosystem.
• Through open platforms, small businesses can connect bank feeds from their financial institution to other services, to get a comprehensive view of their cash flow.
• Sitting at the intersection of commerce, banking, and business services, payments has been one of the first use cases of embedded finance, and a large number of the aspiring embedded-finance providers originate from the payments industry.

These technologies offer enhanced security, transparency, and efficiency, making them ideal for financial transactions within embedded finance ecosystems. Embedded finance aims to make financial services more accessible to a broader audience. As more industries embrace this concept, individuals who may have been underserved or excluded from traditional financial services will have greater access to essential financial tools. As finance becomes deeply embedded over time, the financial service will become part of our everyday life and activities. As a futurist, it would be great to witness the evolution of embedded finance in travel and transportation systems.

Under the Surface: the Embedded Finance Opportunity

Serving the world’s largest corporate clients and institutional investors, we support the entire investment cycle with market-leading research, analytics, execution and investor services. Creating islands of data that don’t connect with the existing small business ecosystem, or ancillary sources, only makes the experience more difficult to navigate for all involved. He helps implement innovative analytic solutions to address business and risk challenges, supporting governance of the bank. We caught up with Vishal Shah, Head of Embedded Finance at SAP Fioneer, to discuss all things embedded finance and what the future is going to look like. The promise of truly universal embedded finance isn’t some distant dream, it’s a reality we’re aggressively driving towards.

This helps platforms provide users with tailored offerings – increasing engagement – and helping to prevent fraudulent transactions. Despite heightened regulatory oversight, the focus will be on streamlining and effectively managing the customer journey. It’s important to note that embedded finance isn’t driven by direct consumer demand; rather, it’s about delivering a more straightforward and user-friendly experience. Rather than push products, a great salesperson unlocks or solves problems, guiding their customers to solutions that add value – whether by putting out fires, or enabling future growth.

Poor Synchronization Hinders Onboarding Process

To help financial service leaders navigate this emerging market, Insider Intelligence detailed key embedded finance trends and potential growth opportunities. In parallel, the rapid adoption of digital wallets worldwide has transformed payments for consumers and merchants alike. According to the EY report The Rise of PayTech – seven forces shaping the future of payments, the share of mobile commerce outpaced desktop e-commerce in 2021, with transaction value from mobile devices reaching 52% of all e-commerce spending. With various value-added offerings such as loyalty programs, security and an open loop payments system on offer, the total number of digital wallet users is expected to exceed 5.2b globally by 2026, up from 3.4b in 20224. It’s clear that online marketplaces, retailers, automotive OEMs and software companies will play a growing role in influencing the future of financial services. However, embedded finance creates significant opportunity for financial services and nonfinancial services organizations, both separately and in concert.

For example, in developing countries, 65mn firms have an unmet financing need of US$5.2tn. Embedded payments and embedded insurance have a higher level of maturity than embedded credit or lending. Embedded finance providers such as Unit and Checkout.com do the legwork of building partnerships with banks and creating APIs to help companies quickly add on services like banking and payment cards. Then, they partner with non-financial companies (their customers) to get them up and running with these embedded finance products and services in weeks or months, rather than the years it would take to build. Embedded fintech provides a way for financial institutions to offer a wider range of services, engage their customers, and deliver more value. Historically, if a bank wanted to offer a new product, say a new type of investment or a different type of loan, they would need to spend months, if not years, developing, building, and launching a new product.

Embedded Insurance

Rather, they are software companies that partner with banks and technology providers to embed financial products into a single seamless, convenient, and easy-to-use customer experience. This new form of partnership between banks, technology providers, and distributors of financial products via nonfinancial platforms underpins what has been hailed as the embedded-finance revolution. Sitting at the intersection of commerce, banking, and business services, payments has been one of the first use cases of embedded finance, and a large number of the aspiring embedded-finance providers originate from embedded payments trends the payments industry. The realization of embedded finance relies heavily on technological capabilities, as technology acts as the critical bridge connecting financial institutions with customer distribution channels. Powering the connects across the embedded finance landscape are numerous intermediate technology firms focused on building platform networks that link brands to traditional financial institution to create seamless customer experiences. To shed light on the expected growth of embedded finance, we interviewed 21 global companies with leading financial technology platforms.