What happened: Qonto and Mollie announced their partnership, where both fintech companies would integrate the other party into their service. Thanks to this partnership, French neobank Qonto will offer payment links in its invoicing product. Dutch payment provider Mollie will offer Qonto business accounts directly embedded into its platform (Qonto CEO on LinkedIn; Mollie blog post).
My comment: Yes, I know that the partnership of two fintech companies does not fall into my very own Embedded Finance definition. But Mollie is Qonto’s first massive customer of its new Qonto Embed banking-as-service offering (which I covered here) , so it’s worth a closer look.
While Mollie is Qonto Embed’s biggest partner, it is clearly not the typical banking-as-a-service partnership. To me, it seems more like a strategic partnership that aims to cross-sell each other's products into the partner’s ecosystem, and it just happens that Qonto Embed is being used for this. Even Qonto’s CEO did not mention Qonto Embed directly in its LinkedIn post (linked above).
I fully get why Qonto integrated Mollie for its payment link service. This is something that Qonto would perhaps never want to build itself, and Mollie is a great partner. Besides any exclusive contractual agreement, Qonto could always integrate another payment provider to cover other jurisdictions or even replace Mollie at one point. However, I don’t understand why Mollie offers Qonto payment accounts to its customers and did not build its own solution. Yes, I know that there are some benefits. Firstly, the Qonto brand is a strong factor. Secondly, Qonto has built already a full-fledged account offering, and the beauty of Qonto Embed is that these features can either be accessed via the Mollie frontend or (for example, if Mollie does not integrate some banking features) the account owner can also visit the Qonto website or app and access the features over there. All of this being said, I would still argue that Mollie's dependency on Qonto is much higher than the other way around. Especially considering that many payment providers are expanding their product offerings to tie merchants closer to their ecosystem. A payment account offering is likely crucial for this strategy, so why not build it in-house? Or maybe I am wrong, and that’s precisely why partnering with Qonto is the right move. What do you think?
