In February 2022, Dave, a US challenger bank with $380m of assets, was trading at $364/share, giving it a valuation of $5.2bn. This valuation exceeded Banco Sabadell, Spain’s fourth largest bank, which at the time had $287bn in assets, 12 million customers and a market cap of $4.6bn. Today, Dave’s…

Banks like Starling, Westpac and BBVA have slowed down or stopped their BaaS sales. BaaS providers like Solaris, Varengold and Cross River have got into hot water with regulators. Railsr went into administration. And valuations of former embedded finance darlings like Stripe and Klarna have been hit massively. What happened…

TL;DR: Replacement of core banking systems is inevitable. Banking is a 24/7 real-time activity yet banks are running on systems that pre-date the internet. The current replacement options are either pre-cloud systems with rich functionality or cloud-based systems with limited functionality; and neither is easy to implement. …

Four key themes emerge from this year’s paper around regulation, verticalization, incumbents’ increasing activity levels, and the widening scope of embedded finance For our embedded finance predictions paper, we tried to source predictions across the many facets of embedded finance — payments, lending, regulation, wealth management, banking, insurance — from…

Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered are so far leading the way, establishing playbooks for others to follow. This is a great time to be an incumbent bank. The best time for decades. Net interest margins (NIMs), the spread banks make over what they charge borrowers and what they pay to…

Jaid helps large institutions to intelligently automate important but mundane tasks, like resolving customer post-trade queries or updating CRM systems for changes in deal statuses. The system makes everything look simple — but it’s an engineering feat that is opening up a market opportunity worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Marketing services drive deal flow …

Fintech has achieved a lot — notably around making financial services simpler and more intuitive — but it has failed to solve society’s big financial challenges. Embedded finance, if implemented well, will change that. — TL;DR Fintech has been through two waves, and is just entering its third wave, embedded finance. The first two waves brought product and channel innovation, but they didn’t fundamentally change the business model of financial services. As a result, the chronic underprovision of financial services persisted or worsened. Embedded finance…

The embedded banking opportunity is clear, but choosing the right partner might be less so — You probably won’t be very surprised to hear that the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) market is pretty hot right now. …

Banking-as-a-Service might be en vogue, but that doesn’t mean it’s well understood — I came across this impressive twitter thread a while back from Nicolas Benady, who runs a new Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform called Swan. It explains why BaaS, Core Banking and Open Banking solutions are totally different. But, to our mind, some of the confusion is justified. While today there is a…