Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 16. Published 9 January 2025. Guest: Hessel Kuik, co-founder of Bizcuit. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast and the first episode of 2025. My name is Lars Markull. Embedded finance describes the merger of the non-financial with the financial world. Typically we are seeing non-financial companies such as Uber, Starbucks or Shopify integrate financial services and offer them to their users. With the combination of these two worlds, the best companies aim to achieve customer value of 1 plus 1 equals 3. This means the user has a better experience using an embedded finance product instead of two separate solutions. We often assume that only non-financial brands can integrate financial services, but can banks also integrate non-financial offerings and thus also create embedded finance products? In this podcast I'm speaking with Hessel Kuik, who is a co-founder of Bizcuit. Bizcuit enables banks to offer accounting and invoicing features, and thus they can compete directly with standalone bookkeeping tools that offer banking products. Let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Hessel, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Hessel Kuik: Hi Lars. Thanks for having me. My name is Hessel and I'm in Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Lars Markull: Great to have you on the show. In the intro message I already spoke a little bit about what you and your team at Bizcuit are doing. Obviously you enable banks in a way to enter the offering, or enable them to offer embedded finance products. Maybe to kick things off, can you just explain a little bit what Bizcuit exactly does and how you approach the market?
What Bizcuit does
Hessel Kuik: Yeah, sure. So with Bizcuit we have a clear purpose, and the purpose is to make the lives of entrepreneurs easier. And we still see that many entrepreneurs struggle with their daily finances. Many entrepreneurs are still spending their Sunday afternoons on typing over invoice details into internet banking, et cetera. And we want to automate that for them. And we want to do that in the banking app. So what we do with Bizcuit is sell embedded services to banks. So we enable all banks to become SME banks and have these features inside the bank app.