Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 54. Published 5 November 2026. Guest: Ben Cousens, Chief Strategy Officer at ZBD. Host: Lars Markull.
Intro
Lars Markull: Grand Theft Auto VI has been eight to 10 years in the making, with rumours of a development budget somewhere north of $2 billion. At the same time, the price of a game at retail has barely moved up. So studios have started handing content creation over to their own players, and those players now want to get paid for their work.
Ben Cousens is chief strategy officer at ZBD, which builds what it calls the money layer for games. He came to this from the games industry rather than from fintech. He started as a game tester, moved into game production, and later got into venture capital, investing into games businesses. That is where he met the ZBD team, invested in the business, and eventually joined the company.
ZBD holds e-money and MiCA licences in the EU and a money transmitter licence in the US and runs Bitcoin's Lightning Network underneath as the plumbing. We get into why the games industry only ever thought about money coming in and what changed once players started making the content themselves. Ben walks through what the full stack looks like inside a game.
A player account that carries an IBAN, skins traded between players for game currency that converts straight into real money, and a publisher branded debit card that pays games points back on everyday spend. He also explains why ZBD went after its own licences instead of building on someone else's, why the company stopped leading with Bitcoin, and he closes on a prediction about Xbox that games industry listeners may want to argue with.
My name is Lars Markull, and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review, a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. And if you're working on an embedded finance project, newsletter subscribers can book a free intro call with me to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners. Not subscribed yet? Sign up at embeddedfinancereview.com, then use the link in the newsletter or simply reply to any edition. I'll pick it up from there.
And now, let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Ben, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Ben Cousens: I am good today, and right now I'm in London.
Lars Markull: It's exciting to have you on the podcast. Today we're diving into the whole world of gaming meets embedded finance, so maybe there are some listeners out there who feel like their two worlds are meeting right now. And you have spent quite a bit of time in the industry, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you have seen the industry maybe a couple of years ago. What was the intersection of gaming, fintech and embedded finance? Maybe bring us all on the same level with that knowledge, and then we can take it from there.
A games career, and a payments stack coming up for grabs
Ben Cousens: So I suppose your audience is primarily in the fintech and embedded finance world, and actually my background is from the video games industry. I started my career a long time ago as a game tester, so doing QA, which is a great job apart from the fact that it does give you headaches.
And then I went into game production, which, simplifying a lot, was getting the games released on time, so working with the teams to make sure that we hit the production schedule and the games would come out to a high standard. It was great fun, but it wasn't the career I was really looking for. The main driving factor back then was that I wanted to be in London, and the studio I worked for wasn't there.
So fast-forward several years and I went into a career in investment banking in the City, and ultimately wound up in venture capital, investing in video games businesses. And this is around 2017. I was looking at a lot of the trends in the video games industry from an investment point of view.