Embedded finance and integrated finance services are shaking up the way finance is seen, delivered and accessed in the digital world. Whether it’s making payments flow faster, enabling intuitive borrowing and loans, or helping businesses scale into new territories, embedded finance is fast becoming a must-have for any digitally – native business.
But that doesn’t just make it an exciting prospect for the innovators using these solutions. For software engineers and product specialists, it also offers a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of a technical revolution, developing tools that empower innovation and solve age-old problems across every industry.
To find out more about what makes embedded finance such an exciting tech challenge, we spoke to three of Weavr’s finest: CTO and co-founder Adrian Mizzi, Product Lead Maria Stellini, and Data Lead Robert Mifsud Bonnici.
Solving problems in every sector
At Weavr, we’re never building the same thing over and over again. The same old technologies aren’t going to keep solving new problems, and we can’t support our innovators if we’re not striving forward with them.
“Embedded finance is about pushing boundaries,” says Adrian. “We’re constantly asking how we can come up with solutions for what’s never been solved before.”
Despite the name, embedded finance isn’t just driving forward fintech. Wherever money moves through digital platforms, embedded finance is being called upon to sharpen up payment flows and access to funds.
“One of the things that’s most exciting about finance is it’s an industry everyone touches on, whether they want to or not,” says Robert. “Even if you have no background in finance, every day you’re using your card and making payments.”
Working in embedded finance means working across all manner of industries beyond finance. Our solutions help to power everything from employee-benefit providers to healthcare marketplaces. That’s not to mention the many platforms it enhances, which can offer anything from education to employee benefits.
Embedded finance isn’t an end product, in other words. It’s an enabling capability that can be applied across all industries to solve the unique problems faced by innovators and, ultimately, build better products for their customers.
Disruption powering disruption
In an industry so defined by risk and regulation, the financial world has traditionally been bound up tight. Services are locked into banks, and innovators are held back from offering those services within their platforms because of the huge technical and compliance barriers.
That’s not just bad for businesses – it also means a disjointed experience for customers, as their banking solutions are always a step removed from all the other applications they use each day. The purpose of embedded finance is to break down those barriers between banks and businesses.
“It’s about making financial services more accessible,” Maria says. “One of the missions of Weavr is to open things up and make it as easy as possible for businesses to deliver these financial services to their customers – from loans and digital wallets to splitting payments.”
That puts what we do in a unique position that’s not quite B2B and not quite B2C either. Embedded finance is disrupting the finance world, but its end goal is to empower further disruption in other markets and that means having a foot in both camps. What we develop has to offer all the functionality and compliance innovators need for their platform, as well as the security and frictionless ease of use that end customers expect.
“The challenge we’re always trying to solve is how to build a product for businesses while thinking about the end user,” says Maria. “That’s from a technical perspective as well as a product perspective, and it’s not something you typically find in other companies who are just developing an API or an app.”
Breaking down the financial frontier
As we fling wide the doors to financial services, it not only empowers innovators but underserved communities too.
When the investment needed to set up financial services from scratch is so huge, the potential returns need to be large enough to justify it. But that means smaller or niche segments of the population – who aren’t seen as profitable enough – end up going under the radar.
But when a tool like Weavr enables innovators to plug financial services into their platform with minimal setup burden, that narrative changes. For example, the ability to issue IBANs opens up renting platforms and gig economy marketplaces to unbanked populations. Meanwhile funds provisioned on flexible virtual cards can extend healthcare and education services to more people than ever before.
“Often those ideas would not see the light of day because the barrier for entry is too high,” says Adrian. “But if the barrier is that much lower because of Weavr, then innovators are able to actually create something positive and solve niche problems.”
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