Finance Into Its Next Act
by Lisa McFarland
Embedded finance used to feel like a novelty — an extra button you bolted onto checkout. Six months into 2025, it’s closer to table stakes. When every brand from coffee chains to construction suppliers can tuck payments, lending, or insurance into their own flow, the question isn’t whether money will move in the background, but how safely and predictably it moves once it’s there.
That’s the lens my team and I bring to our mid-season review.
Before we call the next play, I’m checking three gauges on the product console. They’re simple on the surface, but they underpin everything we — and our partners — will do in the back half of the year.
1. Risk Travels With the Money
Instant rails are only useful if risk decisions keep pace. We’ve moved underwriting into the ledger entry itself, letting each credit, debit or payout clear with a built-in “should we trust this?” moment. That change matters to any brand embedding finance: you get a realtime experience without a next-day reconciliation hangover, and your customer service team isn’t left explaining mysterious holds.
2. One Token, Many Routes
A core promise of embedded finance is hiding infrastructure sprawl from the end user. Our Pay API now treats cards, ACH, wallets, real-time payments
— and yes, even checks — as interchangeable routes tied to a single token. Treasury teams see one liquidity picture, engineers see one integration and customers simply see funds arrive. The rails themselves become a detail, not a decision point.
3. Core In-House, Edge In Partnership
Owning the heavy machinery of the stack keeps us nimble; selective alliances give us sharper signals without slowing that pace. Device intelligence from Sardine, issuing muscle from Marqeta, identity data from Socure — each slots into the foundation rather than dictating it. For partners plugging us into their own products, that balance translates to speed and depth: a reliable core that can still adopt the latest specialist capability.
HOW THE PIECES FIT TOGETHER
Move-with-the-money risk, multi-rail tokens and “build-core/borrow-edge” partnerships aren’t separate bullet points on a roadmap that teams will have to debate which to choose from; they reinforce one another. The ledger-level risk check feeds richer data back to our partners, which in turn improves route selection. A unified token makes it trivial to test a new payment rail or fraud model without rewriting code. And a tight core means we can add — or swap — specialist providers quickly when the market shifts. The loop keeps tightening, and every turn raises the bar for what “embedded” really means.
WHERE WE’RE HEADED AFTER THE WHISTLE
In the second half, expect liquidity to become programmable — routes will change on the fly based on cost, context and customer preference. AI models, finally looking at a full picture instead of fragmented snapshots, will fade false positives into the background. And M&A consolidation will reward platforms that pair end-to-end governance with a modular interface.
Our job is to make that future feel ordinary: money that moves, settles and reconciles so smoothly that product teams can focus on delight, not downtime. If we do it right, embedded finance stops being a buzzword and starts feeling like reliable infrastructure — power and plumbing for the digital economy.
Halftime is over. See you in Q3.
