The digital bank piece in the embedded finance puzzle

WHEN paying for your ride on a ride-hailing platform, the app nudges you to round off your fare and put the extra cents into an investment product. A merchant on an e-commerce platform gets a notification that they are eligible for a loan based on their sales. These are instances of how embedded finance has crept into our lives.

On a quest for profitability, startups are inching into our online existence bearing offers of financial services via non-financial avenues - your shopping basket, your payment gateway.

Tapping on traditional banks, startups have gone on to offer everything from investments to insurance to loans. That’s not including financial services offered by companies themselves, such as payments and buy now, pay later (BNPL) facilities.