Hi from Berlin,
It's my first weekly newsletter of July, and I already feel the summer break is in full swing. I haven't seen any major embedded finance announcements in Europe over the past week, which doesn't happen that often. I have a plan in mind for the quiet summer weeks, but I was hoping it wouldn't kick in this early in July.
Luckily, I have a few backup stories. I've been meaning to write these two up for a while, and both are about interesting non-financial brands. I hope you enjoy them, and let's hope there are a few more announcements before the actual summer break ;-)
Now let's dive in 👇
How Fortnox Built Its Embedded Finance Stack
The Swedish accounting platform Fortnox is one of Europe's more complete examples of embedded finance, offering both cards and financing to its customers. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Växjö, Fortnox provides bookkeeping, invoicing, and payroll software to Swedish SMEs and the accounting firms that serve them, and has grown into the leading platform in its home market. On top of that sit two financial products. The company card, live since October 2023, is built with the Swedish fintech Mynt, which acts as the card issuer while Fortnox owns the brand, the interface, and the customer relationship. The financing side runs three products, all underwritten on the accounting data Fortnox already holds: pay-later on supplier invoices and tax, factoring that pays up to 99% of an invoice the next banking day, and a business loan of up to 5m SEK priced on live bookkeeping rather than historical accounts.
What makes Fortnox more than a standard white-label story is where it draws the line between building and buying. The financing runs through Fortnox Finans, its own payment institution licensed by Finansinspektionen, so the credit side is owned in-house, while the card is bought from Mynt. The way I read it, the line follows the margin: lending carries credit risk and credit margin that can justify running your own licensed entity, while a card earns thin interchange and needs scheme membership and issuing infrastructure that a partner can provide just as well. And Fortnox is far from Mynt's only accounting client, with e-conomic, Nordea, Visma, and Accountor all on the list, so one Swedish EMI has signed most of the Nordic accounting market. Whether Fortnox will eventually bring card issuing in-house, with a licence already in place, remains an open question.
How Squarespace Built a Financial Stack for Its Merchants
Squarespace, the US website and commerce platform, has spent three years building a suite of financial products for the businesses that run on it. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in New York, Squarespace has helped millions of customers across more than 200 countries build websites, register domains, sell online, and book appointments. Since 2023, it has added three financial products in sequence: Squarespace Payments for payment acceptance, live since 2023 and now in fifteen countries; Squarespace Capital for financing, added in 2025 and provided by partners such as Celtic Bank in the US; and Squarespace Balance, a March 2026 money account with a Visa business card, funds held at Fifth Third Bank. Stripe sits underneath all three.
Anyone who has followed Shopify will recognise the shape of this, because Shopify built its stack in the same order: payments, then capital, then an account, and even gave its account the same name, Balance. The order follows the benefit each layer brings. Payments come first because merchants have to accept them anyway, so bringing them in-house is the obvious win. Lending is second because it is where a platform helps its merchants grow, and Squarespace already holds the sales data to underwrite well. The account comes last because it adds the least on its own and asks the most in return, useful mainly as a base to build further products on. That same logic orders the map: Payments is live across 10 European markets, Capital has reached the UK and Germany, and Balance has not left the US at all. Whether Squarespace pushes the account into Europe the way it is now pushing lending, or leaves it at home as Shopify has, will be seen over the next few years.