The payment you never see

Tap to ride. Click to split. Auto-pay to renew. By the time you’ve had your second coffee, you’ve likely engaged with a bank, a payments processor, and a credit risk engine. None of which you consciously selected, and none of which you noticed.  

You might have hailed a ride, topped up a subscription, maybe even bought concert tickets on a resale app that now offers “Pay Later” as the default. All of this is made possible through embedded finance: an innovation hiding in plain sight. Most people wouldn’t recognize the term, yet rely on embedded finance constantly.  

Not having to think about embedded finance is the point. No paperwork, no separate logins, no third-party redirects. The transaction blends into the experience, adding value simply by staying out of the way. Ride-hailing, subscriptions, digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later – many of these routines depend on a financial infrastructure built directly into the products and platforms people already use. However, what’s invisible to the end user is becoming impossible for businesses to ignore.

Growth at the seams

Embedded finance is already a multi-billion-dollar business and one of the fastest-growing areas of digital payments. Simon-Kucher estimates embedded finance could unlock up to $800 billion in global value over the next decade¹, but only for those who design the right business model.

What makes embedded finance especially compelling is where it grows best: at the seams between industries.

The opportunities exist not just for fintech providers building the plumbing, but for the companies embedding it. Ecommerce platforms are launching payment solutions, mobility apps are offering insurance, SaaS companies are underwriting loans. The result is a shift in revenue models, customer relationships, and competitive positioning.

Beyond added services, there’s also huge value in owning more of the customer journey. The closer the financial product is to the moment of need, the higher the conversion and the more data is captured. But growth isn’t guaranteed. Misprice your product and margins evaporate. Get the UX wrong, and adoption collapses. Choose the wrong partner, and control over customer data slips away.

This shift is changing what it means to be a financial services provider. Banks and insurers are no longer just direct-to-consumer institutions. They are infrastructure. Many are adapting by repositioning themselves as platform partners rather than gatekeepers, offering white-labeled capabilities to digital-native brands that already command consumer trust.

The user experience is simple. The strategy behind it is anything but.

For businesses, success in this space requires more than just enabling a payment or offering credit at checkout. It begins with identifying where embedded finance creates real value: for the customer, for the brand, and for the business model. It means choosing the right partners. Not just for technical integration, but for long-term alignment on pricing, data, and user experience. 

As the landscape matures, companies are also beginning to treat embedded finance as a core part of their commercial architecture. That means developing new go-to-market models, testing pricing strategies, adjusting product-market fit, and refining offerings over time. In some cases, it means entering new markets altogether, organically or through acquisition, to expand the value chain.

Done well, embedded finance becomes a strategic growth lever, one that touches pricing, positioning, partnerships, and customer loyalty. Invisible to most, essential to many, it’s changing how value is created and captured in the background of daily life - and businesses need to decide where they will play in that value chain.