Hi from Berlin,
It's August, and thus, time to start the recap of the first half of 2026. In the next three weeks, I will share the biggest stories in European Embedded Finance from the past seven months. As this requires a few separate mailings, I was contemplating the right split and considered splitting it by financial product: payments, banking, and lending (since this will be the new newsletter structure from September onwards anyway).
However, I thought to do something different and split the recap by type of companies that made the Embedded Finance moves. Thus, the rest of August looks like this:
- Marketplaces and Consumer Brands (Today)
- Vertical SaaS and ERP (Aug 18th)
- Enablers and Market Moves (Aug 25th)
I aimed to make the newsletter easily digestible and help you find the relevant stories quickly.
The subcategories for today are:
- Food delivery and merchant lending
- E-commerce seller financing
- Marketplace payments infrastructure
- Platform-to-worker cards
- Co-brand or embedded finance?
- TikTok's push into financial services
- Other consumer brands
I hope you enjoy it. If you have any feedback, please let me know.
PS: I made a small backend switch regarding hosting and email delivery providers. Fingers crossed it does not affect any email delivery or website access. If you spot anything, please reach out to me. This switch lets me make some of the upcoming changes after summer.
Now let's dive in!
Building something in embedded finance? Whether you are a brand comparing providers, an enabler working through your go-to-market strategy, or a team trying to fill a crucial (fintech) role, my office hours are a free call to talk it through. I share my honest read and, where it helps, intros to my network.
Food delivery and merchant lending
Four delivery platforms with four different lending partners, but the same embedded playbook.
- Deliveroo × Liberis: Merchant funding for UK restaurants. Every major food delivery platform now offers embedded lending. (EFR)
- efood × finmid: efood Capital gives 21,000 Greek restaurant partners up to €30k in under 48 hours based on platform transaction data. (EFR)
- Just Eat Takeaway.com × YouLend: Passed €150m in embedded financing to restaurants across seven European markets. (EFR)
- Glovo × PragmaGO: PragmaCash, a second merchant lending programme alongside its finmid-powered Glovo Capital. (EFR)