The extremely popular US bookkeeping tool QuickBooks has been a long-standing partner of Bill. To simplify it a lot, a SME could use QuickBooks to write invoices and then use Bill for banking or payment-related activities. Both companies were benefiting from this partnership, with Bill mentioning the importance of QuickBooks as an acquisition channel multiple times. In the past few months, Intuit, Quickbooks parent company, has made steps towards separating from their partner Bill, which resulted in the (re)launch of QuickBooks Money - an all-in-one payments and banking solution. Additionally, and this is the very interesting part, QuickBooks also started to block API access for Bill, forcing their customers to discontinue using Bill in favor of QuickBooks's own solution.
In a world where everything can be embedded and smart leaders understand the power of embedded, this is likely to happen a lot more. Companies like QuickBooks did not have the possibility of an embedded finance product a few years ago when they started partnering with Bill. But the world of fintech infrastructure has changed a lot since then. Companies that are providing a sticky, data-rich B2B service (see the link to the Matt Harris podcast in the insightful read section) are ideally positioned to offer financial services. And why would you hand over your customers to a traditional financial institution or fintech company in exchange for a small revenue share when instead you could service them on your own with an embedded finance offering and earn a lot more? And in some cases, the non-monetary benefits of embedded finance create a flywheel, something any company is trying to find.
