OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK

Make no mistake about it: Embedded finance has jumped the snark…uh, shark. It’s a full blown gold rush, and everyone and their mother is jumping on the bandwagon. Here are some recent headlines from:

  • synovus. The company will launch Maast, a money-as-a-service (get it?) offering, later in 2022, and announced a strategic investment in Qualpay to leverage the fintech’s payments technology.
  • adyen Adyen announced its expansion beyond payments to build “embedded financial” products to help platforms and marketplaces create tailored financial experiences for merchants.
  • lemon.markets. The Germany-based neo-brokerage raised €15 million to accelerate its product development that would enable non-financial firms to integrate stock trading into their services.
  • columns This fintech acquired a one-branch bank and built its own banking platform, with a direct connection to the Fed’s payments network. According to Fintech Business Weekly, it was “designed to be made available to third parties from day one—let’s call it a third-gen or native BaaS.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Embedded finance estimates

How big is embedded finance? There’s a growing number of estimates for the global embedded finance opportunity. A December 2021 pymnts.com article reported:

“A new study, the Next-Gen Commercial Banking Tracker, reports that embedded finance will reach a $7 trillion value globally in the next 10 years.”

The report, however, contains no references to this $7 trillion estimate (there are 17 instances of the number 7, none of which is preceded by a dollar sign or followed by the word “trillion”). Sadly, people cite this number as if it was scientifically proven.

Not that embedded finance aficionados have any inclination or incentive to know the “real” number. Generally speaking, they’re happy to hear as large a number as anyone is willing to provide.

I found another article citing the $7.2 trillion number on Fintech Switzerland. It says the source of the number was a report published by Mambu, so I downloaded that report. It references the estimate with a link to one of my own articles. Only problem is, there’s no reference to a$7.2 trillion embedded finance “valuation” in my article.