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.
In other Embedded Finance news
Poor provider service is costing embedded finance customers revenue, new Equals research finds: Research commissioned by Equals and conducted by Visa Consulting & Analytics, based on a survey of more than 150 senior decision-makers across banks, fintechs, and trading platforms in the UK and Western Europe, found that 60% of CFOs have lost revenue due to poor provider support and 45% say service issues have limited the benefits of embedded finance. 63% of CFOs describe some providers as too big to care, while 60% say others are too small to deliver at scale. (Good Money Guide)
Perkbox adds Penfold workplace pensions to its benefits app: The UK employee benefits platform Perkbox, used by more than 7,500 employer organisations, now offers Penfold's digital workplace pension alongside perks, rewards, and wellbeing tools. Penfold owns and operates the product, which puts the deal at the distribution end of the spectrum and not Embedded Finance. Pensions remain one of the hardest products for a platform to take any deeper than distribution. (FF News)
AliExpress merchants and shoppers in Brazil get embedded credit through Bettr and QI Tech: Ant International's lending arm Bettr has partnered with Brazilian infrastructure provider QI Tech to offer working capital loans to SME sellers and a BNPL option at checkout for AliExpress shoppers. Both products use automated credit assessments based on transactional data, with QI Tech providing the regulated infrastructure, from onboarding and credit analysis to issuance. (Asian Banking & Finance)
Contractor Plus launches embedded payments with Finix: The US field service management platform, serving more than 57,000 contractors, has built Contractor Plus Pay on Finix's payment infrastructure, covering recurring billing, progress payments, card fee management, and instant payouts. The two companies plan to extend the product to subcontractor collaboration and contractor-to-contractor payments next. (The Manila Times)
Cross River and Stripe build card issuing for AI agents: When an AI agent makes a purchase, Stripe's Link wallet now issues a restricted, single-use virtual card scoped to that transaction, with Cross River's banking core handling card network rules, AML, and KYC. This is not embedded finance by our definition, but it is the first bank-grade issuing infrastructure built for agentic commerce and is worth having on the radar. (The Paypers)
That's it for this edition. If you enjoy my newsletter, podcast, or events, the best way to support me is to share them with others in your network. Feedback is always welcome, too.
Need help with an embedded finance project? Visit my website and let's talk.
Best wishes,
Lars Markull (LinkedIn)
