Author: Lydia Inboden

Over the last decade, I’ve watched expectations shift– now people expect money to move as fast as a text message. The latest PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Digital Transformation and Instant Payments Fuel Business Disbursement Efficiency,” confirms what we see every day at Ingo Payments. Instant is no longer a feature. It’s the baseline. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. consumers now receive non-government disbursements instantly, up from just 4% in 2017. That’s a tenfold leap in less than a decade. The study also shows that instant isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s becoming non-negotiable. One in four consumers say they need a payout within 30 minutes, and more than half would actively choose an instant option if given the choice. Parents, Gen Z and millennials are driving that urgency, but the appetite spans every demographic. Borrowing and income payouts top the charts: 45% of loan disbursements and 44% of wage payments now hit consumer accounts in real time. People want certainty, and they’re willing to pay for it. Twenty percent would shell out a “substantially higher” fee for instant access when the need is critical, and a full 64% of heavy instant users are open to premium pricing. That’s not gouging; it’s value — as long as the experience is seamless. Where do customers want the money to land? Straight into the bank without any annoying layovers. Thirty-five percent favor direct-to-account pushes (often via Zelle or push-to-debit), while interest in wallet deposits is climbing fast, led by PayPal and CashApp. The destination may vary, but the expectation is the same: cash that’s good to spend the moment it shows up. Moving money isn’t just about speed; it’s about freedom. When a gig worker can cash out earnings after every shift, she can buy groceries on the way home instead of waiting for Friday. When an insurer pays a claim in seconds, the customer can replace a windshield before the next rainstorm. That’s money mobility in action — and it builds loyalty you can’t buy with points alone. At Ingo, we’ve spent two decades wiring together the rails, risk controls, and compliance guardrails required to make that mobility safe. Today our embedded platform lets banks, FinTechs and enterprises fund accounts, push payouts, issue cards and settle bills in real time without stitching together 10 vendors. If you can originate the transaction, we can make the money appear where your customer wants it. Reading the Signals Urgency is the new normal. Twenty-four percent of consumers define “urgent” as half an hour or less. That window will shrink. Institutions that cling to next-day ACH will lose relevance — and balances — to those that don’t. Bigger tickets, bigger expectations. The larger the disbursement, the stronger the demand for instant. Consumers receiving more than $500 are 33% more likely to insist on real-time delivery. Payroll advances, tax refunds and loan proceeds all belong on instant rails. Trust travels with the funds. Instant receivers report satisfaction levels nearly 20% higher than those stuck with slow payments. Happy customers transact more, stay longer and cost less to serve. Willingness to pay is segmented. Gen Z consumers will pay a premium for speed; baby boomers won’t. A tiered fee model — percentage for micro-payouts, flat for large sums — keeps everyone in the game. How Ingo Turns Findings Into Functionality Destination flexibility. We can push funds to over 4.5 billion endpoints — debit cards, bank accounts, wallets, prepaid cards — so you never force a customer to compromise. Risk ready. We embed recipient authentication and account verification to reduce fraud and support compliance—without slowing down speed to funds.Single stack simplicity. One API, one contract, one settlement file. Your treasury team sleeps better; your developers ship faster; your CFO likes the economics. Monetization built in. Fee configurability lets you price by customer segment, transaction type, or urgency — capturing the premium the market already signals it will pay. Where We Go From Here The real-time revolution won’t slow down. The FedNow® service is live, RTP® volume is doubling and open-banking APIs are maturing. The competitive battleground will shift from whether you can send money instantly to how intelligently you route, price and personalize every disbursement. My advice: Map every outbound dollar — wages, refunds, rebates, claims, loans — and score each flow for customer impact and operational drag. Prioritize high-impact, high-friction use cases for instant enablement. (Start with anything that triggers a call to your contact center when it’s late.) Choose partners that treat speed, risk and user experience as a single problem, not three separate projects. Money wants to move. Your customers expect it and technology finally makes it economical at scale. At Ingo, we’re ready to help you turn disbursements from a cost center into a strategic advantage. Let’s make money mobile. Instantly.

There’s an old saying in fintech that experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. After a decade leading sales and strategy for some of the industry’s pioneering embedded finance and banking platforms, I can tell you this: The lessons that stick with you aren’t from the wins – they’re from the moments that made you completely rethink what’s possible. I love sharing those insights with clients because they often mirror the same journey I’ve been on. They’ll come to me excited about launching a new financial product or service, full of ideas about features and user experience. But then we get to the hard questions about risk management, regulatory compliance, and scalability. That’s when the real conversation begins. Here’s what I’ve learned: building innovative financial products isn’t about having the newest technology or the slickest interface. It’s about having the wisdom to know what you don’t know, and the foresight to build for where the industry is going. Not where it’s been. And where we’re going by 2025 will surprise a lot of people. By next year, the embedded finance landscape will be unrecognizable. The patchwork of vendors and APIs that power most financial services today will give way to unified platforms that own 90% of their technology stack. Companies trying to piece together a dozen different providers for basic money movement won’t survive regulatory scrutiny or scale demands. This isn’t speculation – it’s what happens when regulatory oversight meets enterprise reality. The Regulatory Tide Is Rising The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recent expansion of supervision to cover major payment providers is a fundamental shift in how regulators view embedded finance. When tech giants face bank-level scrutiny, the old playbook of moving fast, breaking things, and fixing compliance later simply doesn’t work. I’ve sat across the table from bank examiners. They don’t care about your innovative UX or how quickly you can onboard customers. They care about one thing: risk management and oversight.  And when your platform depends on 8-12 different vendors to process basic transactions, demonstrating effective risk management becomes nearly impossible. Think about what happens when a bank examiner asks to trace the flow of funds across your platform. In a typical embedded banking setup, critical money movement functions are fragmented across multiple vendors – from basic account funding to payment processing to check deposits. Each vendor has their own data format, their own retention policies, and their own security protocols. It’s a nightmare scenario for both the bank and their fintech partners. The Enterprise Wake-Up Call This regulatory evolution is driving a fundamental shift in who succeeds in embedded finance, and recent events have made this crystal clear. When a major Banking-as-a-Service provider recently filed for bankruptcy, we discovered something troubling: around $85 million in customer funds across 100,000 accounts couldn’t be properly traced or accessed. The root cause wasn’t only inadequate ledgering technology – it was a broader failure of infrastructure and controls. Let me break down what enterprises need to understand about modern financial infrastructure. Your ledger is the foundation of trust for every dollar that moves through your platform. When you’re managing multiple banking relationships and serving enterprise clients, you need four critical pillars working in harmony: First, bulletproof ledgering that can track every penny in real-time. This means knowing exactly where money is, who it belongs to, and maintaining a complete audit trail of how it got there. When regulators ask questions, you need answers immediately, not after days of reconciliation. Second, comprehensive third-party risk management. Every vendor, every integration, every partner becomes part of your risk profile. In today’s environment, you’re responsible for the entire chain of custody for customer funds. One weak link can bring down the whole system. Third, bank-grade security and privacy controls. This isn’t simply ‘encrypting data’ and putting a bow on it – it’s about building systems that can prevent commingling of funds, ensure proper segregation of duties, and support immutable audit trails. When you’re handling enterprise-scale money movement, every security decision has million-dollar implications. Fourth, automated compliance that scales. Manual reviews and periodic audits won’t cut it anymore. You need systems that can automatically flag suspicious patterns, enforce regulatory requirements, and adapt as rules change. This is where compliance automation becomes critical – humans in large banking operations can’t keep up with the volume and complexity of modern financial transactions. That’s why my conversations with enterprise prospects have fundamentally changed. I’ve been recently diving deep into questions like: How do you keep separate ledgers for operating funds versus customer deposits? What controls prevent commingling of funds across different programs? Can you provide real-time reconciliation across all banking partners? How do you track and document the full lifecycle of every transaction? What happens if one of your banking partners faces regulatory challenges? These are existential questions that decide whether you can work in a regulated environment. When regulators demand a complete audit trail of all customer funds, you can’t afford to have gaps in your ledger or rely on third parties to piece together the compliance story. You need rock-solid infrastructure that can stand up to scrutiny while supporting the speed enterprises demand. The winners in this space won’t be the ones with the most features or the fastest integrations. They’ll be the ones who’ve built bank-grade infrastructure into their DNA, who can demonstrate complete control and visibility over every dollar that touches their platform. Because in today’s regulatory environment, anything less is a recipe for disaster. Building for Bank-Grade Scale In my view, the solution isn’t about adding more vendors or building more complex integrations. It’s fundamentally rethinking how we deliver embedded finance at enterprise scale. This requires leveraging platforms that: First, own the majority of the value chain. Instead of slapping together 12 different vendors, leading platforms are bringing critical capabilities in-house – from core processing to risk management to compliance monitoring. Second, automate compliance by design. When regulatory requirements are built into your platform architecture rather than bolted on afterward, you can maintain both speed and security. Third, provide bank relationship portability. Your technology shouldn’t lock you into a single bank partnership. Enterprises need the flexibility to work with multiple banks while maintaining consistent technology and compliance frameworks. Implementation in the Real World For enterprises considering embedded finance initiatives, here’s what successful implementation looks like in practice: Start with risk assessment. Map out every money movement touchpoint in your proposed solution and name potential compliance requirements before writing a single line of code. Build for examination. Design your data architecture assuming regulators will want to see everything. This means consistent formatting, comprehensive audit trails, and real-time access to critical information. Plan for scale. The compliance frameworks that work for 100 transactions won’t work for 100 million. Build automated controls that can scale with your business. The 2025 Vision By 2025, the embedded finance market will be unrecognizable from today. The successful platforms won’t only connect APIs: they’ll own most of the value chain and more, eliminate third–party risk, and deliver bank–grade compliance at fintech speed. This transformation won’t be driven by new technology or innovative features. It will be driven by enterprise demands for reliability, security, and compliance at scale. The winners will be the platforms that understand both banking and technology – that can move at fintech speed while supporting bank-grade controls. For enterprises exploring embedded finance, the message is clear: partner with platforms that have lived through the compliance evolution, not just the technology revolution. Because in embedded finance, experience isn’t just what you get when things go wrong – it’s what prevents things from going wrong in the first place. The future of finance belongs to the enterprises. And the platforms that succeed will be the ones built for enterprise scale from day one.

In my case, a better title for this column would be “Why I Rejoined Ingo Money.” I originally began working at Ingo Money in 2016 and left roughly five years ago to pursue other opportunities. I have now been back for a couple of months and am so happy to be amongst old friends and colleagues. From push payments to card issuance to banking-as-a-service and even crypto, I’ve helped shape and scale a number of industries over the course of my career. But returning to Ingo this time around has helped drive home what I value most in a product, a team and a workplace culture. I had kept in touch with Drew over the years as I brought Ingo into some deals because of my belief in the tech and the team. But I was not actively considering rejoining the company when I reached out to bend his ear about a few ideas earlier this year and was unaware he was searching for a new sales leader. However, it quickly became apparent that the stars were aligning and this was the place I should be at this stage of my career. That was immediately reinforced when I started again at the company and realized how many of the product and customer team members were the same. It was a testament to Ingo – its business and its culture – that so many people were still with the company five years later. A rarity in this business. Those first few weeks reminded me of what I’d been missing and gave voice to what I love so much about Ingo. It’s the trust. The trust in a product that will perform as advertised, the trust in a team that will do their jobs to the best of their abilities, and the trust in a leadership team that has your back and your best interests at heart. It felt like family. As the Chief Sales Officer, I love the Ingo story. This team cut its teeth on mobile check cashing- one of the riskiest financial instruments in the digital environment. They then built the industry’s premier push payments platform and pioneered the idea of Money Mobility. At nearly every turn, the company has been ahead of the market, and now the market is coming round to meet us. From sectors like lending to insurance to service industry tipping, the value of Money Mobility and embedded instant solutions have become a core business differentiator. And Ingo is primed to deliver. That puts us in the pole position. My first go-round here we had to sell the “why” because few understood push payments or how it would benefit their business. Now that Money Mobility has become the de facto standard, customers are doing their homework on the “who” and then reaching out to us as the clear market leader. There isn’t much need for education – it’s all about working with companies to design the solution that’s best for them. Which speaks to another of our strengths. Ingo doesn’t stop at the sale. Our team is consultative with every client. We are not selling products off a shelf – we are tailoring them to each customer’s needs and then helping them manage and optimize them over time. Lastly, I admire the tenacity of this team and its willingness to take on new challenges. For example, in the new high-risk, highly regulated category of online gaming, everyone dug in with our client Caesars to help them launch real-time payouts for their Sportsbook customers. That level of commitment and engagement is simply in our DNA, and all our clients benefit from it. As a sales team leader, I know this combination of expertise, tenacity and engagement is rare, and I couldn’t ask for anything more. It feels good to be home.