Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 37. Published 13 November 2025. Guest: Alexander Schoonkind, co-founder and CEO of Embed. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Embedded payments sound simple on paper. Integrate a provider, start monetising transaction volumes, and watch revenue grow. But the reality is, it's an operational product with a revenue hat. And if you underestimate what it takes to build, optimise and support, or if you overestimate the complexity and never start, you'll miss one of the biggest opportunities in vertical software as a service today.
Today we're diving deep into the world of embedded payments with Alex Schoonkind, co-founder and CEO of Embed, an embedded payments provider specialising in vertical software as a service companies. In this conversation we will explore the biggest misconceptions companies have when approaching embedded payments, when the right timing actually is to make the move, and why flexible pricing models matter more than you think. We'll discuss why some industries are leaving money on the table, what support overhead to expect, and Alex's prediction for the future of payment providers.
My name is Lars Markull, and this is the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. Every two weeks I interview the builders and shapers of embedded finance. And a quick reminder from my side. At Embedded Finance Review I publish weekly newsletters, a biweekly podcast, and host in-person and virtual industry events. You can find all of this on our website, embeddedfinancereview.com. In addition, I also work with non-financial brands, infrastructure providers and banks in understanding, designing and launching their embedded finance products. If you are interested in working with me, visit my website and reach out. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Alex, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Alexander Schoonkind: Hi Lars. I'm doing great, thanks for having me. I'm located in the centre of Amsterdam, actually.
The two misconceptions
Lars Markull: Lovely. And Alex, today we are going to dive very, very deep into the topic of embedded payments. Obviously a topic that's very close to your heart, also quite a bit for myself. Today I want to talk about the typical questions that non-financial brands have when they come closer to the topic of embedded payments and potentially even integrate that. I guess it's a lot of the questions that you face on a daily basis with some of your leads and companies.
Let's maybe go through them, and maybe let's kick things off with, is there a typical misconception that companies have when they get closer to this topic? We all know that the most common companies for embedded payments are vertical SaaS, marketplaces and so on. So is there a typical misconception that you see quite often in your work with them?
Alexander Schoonkind: Yeah, so I think we primarily focus on vertical SaaS, because in marketplaces it's more of a generic monetisation, right, often in a percentage model that includes all services.
But in vertical SaaS I think there's two common misconceptions, on both sides of the coin almost. There are the ones where they think it's easy, and they actually think just launching a generic payments offering will lead to great adoption from all of their customers, and it will be easy to manage operationally.
And then there are the other customers who are actually quite either scared or against monetising payments because they don't want to appear like a bank. And they want to be as transparent as possible towards their customers, and they would prefer to aggregate others.
And I think there are nuances to both sides. Sometimes either one of those sides might be true. If you run restaurant software, obviously it's part of your core business to accept payments. But there are also platforms who actually potentially can monetise fairly large volumes, like in health tech or property tech, that currently still fail to do so because they think it's too far away from their core company, where I'm thinking they're leaving an opportunity on the table.