Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 45. Published 29 April 2026. Guest: Jane Podbelskaya, founder of Charge Forward. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: What does embedded finance look like from the other side of the Atlantic? Today I'm speaking with Jane Podbelskaya, founder of Charge Forward in Toronto. Jane advises software companies and investors in North America on embedded finance, which is, to put it simply, exactly what I do in Europe. When she reached out on LinkedIn it immediately felt like comparing notes with a counterpart rather than interviewing a guest.
Jane's background is unusual though. She started as a software engineer, spent a decade in VC where she watched Shopify turn payments into 75% of its revenue, and eventually decided the biggest gap wasn't on the capital side, it was on the education side. Software executives still don't understand embedded finance, and that's the problem. She has built her whole business around that.
We talk about how investors are really thinking about embedded finance today, six years after Angela Strange said every company will be a fintech company. We get into AI as a defensive moat, verticalisation, the North America versus Europe divide, and the framework Jane uses when she sits down with a software CEO for the first time.
My name is Lars Markull and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review, a newsletter, podcast and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. If you are working on an embedded finance project and want a free intro call to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners, head to embeddedfinancereview.com.
Before we start, a word from this episode's partner, Hopae. One thing Jane and I get into today is the data advantage that software platforms have when they launch financial products. A lot of that starts at onboarding. And onboarding is exactly where Hopae comes in, as the identity infrastructure layer connecting government identity systems worldwide, so businesses can verify users across markets through one single API. Right now most online identity verification still relies on document photos and facial biometrics, which were never really designed for the internet. Hopae replaces that with eID verification, which is more secure and increasingly required under regulation like eIDAS 2.0 in Europe. If you're building financial products and thinking about how you onboard users, you should check out Hopae, that's hopae.com, or check the link in the show notes.
And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Jane, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Jane Podbelskaya: Hi Lars, great to see you, and thanks for inviting me to this podcast. I am in Toronto, and it's March and it's very gloomy right now.
Lars Markull: You did mention you still have some snow around. Here in Berlin, luckily, we have the spring arrived already.
Jane Podbelskaya: Canada for you. Yes.
From software engineering to VC to embedded finance
Lars Markull: Jane, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I did mention in the introduction already, when you reached out to me on LinkedIn there was an interesting point for me looking at your profile. You help companies with embedded finance in North America, you do have a newsletter focused on embedded finance in North America. Obviously many listeners out there will know this is definitely my profile as well. So I'm really glad you reached out and we are having this chat, because obviously we are doing quite a few things similar but in a very different geography. So happy, as I say in the industry, to compare notes and see what you are seeing, and to have an interesting conversation here.
Before we dive into the meaty part, maybe you can give us a quick introduction about your profile. Going through LinkedIn, there's software development, and now working with companies on embedded finance. I've done not the same journey but ended in the same place with a different background. Quite keen to hear, how did you end up in the world of embedded finance?
Jane Podbelskaya: Yeah, happy to share the story, and indeed there's not a lot of us, so it was really a great pleasure to find you and connect with you. So happy to exchange notes.
You are correct, I started in software engineering and the first decade of my career was all about building software. I was an engineer, I was a solutions architect focused on business process automation software. After completing my MBA here at University of Toronto I spent a couple of years as a management consultant with Bain and Company. I missed technology too much and I ended up at a growth equity fund, and I spent the next decade of my career as a VC, as an investor.
The first six years I was with a growth equity fund called Georgian, based here in Canada, investing across North America. And we were actually a Series B investor in Shopify. Shopify was actually my first introduction into the idea of embedded finance. We were a pure SaaS investor and we understood SaaS economics inside out. Shopify was the company that decided to add payments to their product and to their revenue streams, and it was very, very confusing to us as investors. And then they've shown us that a company can generate 75% of their revenue from payments and other embedded finance products. So that was quite a fascinating journey to watch unfold over a number of years.
But that's not yet how I jumped into embedded finance. I actually left Georgian and joined another fund, and I spent four years as a partner investing with Information Venture Partners, which is a fund investing in financial services technology, including in a payfac. And I was on the board of Helcim for years. That's how I learned the economics of payments and payment facilitation and how it all works. I invested in insurtechs and banktechs and lendtechs, and that's how I started to really learn about this new wave of embedded finance, and how embedded finance vendors are now allowing software companies to offer financial services more easily than the journey that Shopify had to go through when they were embedding payments.
I just realised that the opportunity is really amazing, and that financial services of the future will be delivered through software, and the embedded finance vendors are enabling this trend. But software companies still don't understand it and they don't know how to do this. They know their particular vertical, particular industry that they service. They know software. That's already a lot to know. And then you add on top of that and you get people totally confused.
And that's how I decided to embark on my journey of launching my own company, helping software executives and software companies to understand embedded finance and embedded financial services and ultimately make money out of it. So that's about me in a nutshell.
The language gap
Lars Markull: And I always remember this quote, I think it was Steve Jobs who said you can only connect the dots when you look back. As mentioned, you did start in software development and then you went into VC, and now you're helping companies and you've had the VC experience, first the general tech and then the fintech one. So there are a lot of points that add up to embedded finance. But when you're doing the job you're doing, how do you look back at the different stations in your career, and how are they enabling you to help your clients?
Jane Podbelskaya: So I guess the key insight that I already mentioned to you is that software companies have this amazing opportunity to create very substantial new revenue streams. Shopify is one such example, but you can look at, as soon as you start looking you'll see examples everywhere. Intuit is tax and accounting software that generates a substantial part of their revenue from fintech and payments. GoDaddy is a domain registration service that is actually a fintech in disguise. Toast is restaurant tech, software for restaurants to manage their operations, but 85% of their revenue is fintech. Examples are everywhere when you start looking.
But as I said, the vast majority of software companies still really don't understand fintech. And after working in fintech investing and on the fintech side, I realised that there's a good reason for that, because fintech vendors know fintech very deeply and they speak with a lot of jargon, and they get so used to it that they forget that not the whole world speaks that language.
For example, when an embedded payments company is talking about a software company that they're trying to work with, they call them ISV, independent software vendor. Software companies don't call themselves ISVs. When companies are talking about buy rate and sell rate and attach rate and take rate, software executives' eyes glaze over. They understand SaaS metrics, they understand ARR, they understand retention. They don't understand these terms. When payments companies talk about clients of software companies, they call them merchants. Software companies don't call their clients merchants. They call them either clients or customers or maybe logos, but not merchants.
So this whole disconnect is just the surface level misunderstanding. And then of course when you go into the nitty gritty of how you make money off payments, the gap in knowledge is still really big.
So this is why I decided to launch Charge Forward. Charge Forward is my platform that I run, and it's both an advisory and a media platform. And my core mission is to really demystify, decipher and translate the world of embedded finance for software executives to use, and to generate these amazing new revenue streams from embedded finance.
Lars Markull: As you said, there's definitely maybe more of us required to do that, because it's a major challenge. From my perspective, I'm of course based here in Berlin and looking a lot at the European market. Whenever I look personally at the US market, I always feel like, okay, the challenges that you described right now, I always felt like those are purely or mostly also in Europe, not so much in the US. Because again, when we in Europe talk about embedded finance success stories, we also have our local success stories, but nevertheless Shopify and Toast are definitely the names that very often get dropped as well. So it's a little bit my assumption, or maybe the hope, that it's going to be much easier in the US because you have so many more of these companies who are doing it, maybe a little bit ahead of the curve compared to what's happening in Europe. So the problems you're describing right now, I thought this shouldn't be such a big problem in the US, because it's a little bit more progressed and a little bit more adopted. But it doesn't sound like it, the way you're describing it.
Jane Podbelskaya: Not really. And again, embedded finance is not just payments. Payments is just the first, most commonly embedded product.
Lars Markull: Yeah.
Jane Podbelskaya: There's also embedded lending, embedded insurance, embedded payroll, embedded early wage access. There are lots of other products. And I would say people are starting to understand payments, although again the gap in understanding is still deep. I am running endless education, training, explainer sessions. I'm publishing a lot of one-on-one content just explaining what is a PayFac, what is the PayFac as a service model, what products Stripe actually has, and how do you actually make money from payments, and how to think about it at the different levels of GMV or payments volume.
Still, there's a lot of education needed. But when it comes to other products like lending, banking, insurance, the gap is even deeper. So those are poorly understood products that are yet to go mainstream. So there is a long journey ahead of educating and handholding.
What investors actually think now
Lars Markull: Good to know. And Jane, we spoke about your background, and before doing what you're doing today you were in VC. I'm quite keen to hear, obviously in our embedded finance industry we very often have this quote from Angela Strange, every company will be a fintech company. I think it was January 2020, so it's now over six years ago since that phrase was coined. Obviously a lot of discussion about whether people agree with that statement, yes or no, but let's not go too much into those unnecessary details. But what is the US VC perspective on embedded finance? Here in Europe, I guess it's the same everywhere, it's going a little bit through this hype cycle. I think especially the COVID years were pretty heavy on embedded finance, and we also had some challenges after that. What's your personal view on especially the VC or the investor look at embedded finance?
Jane Podbelskaya: It's a great question. In terms of the cycle and whether it played out, it absolutely has played out, and we're now in what people call the pragmatic part of the cycle. So software companies are actively embedding financial services, but it's quite unevenly distributed, both amongst companies and amongst investors.
I do a lot of portfolio assessments for funds to help them identify embedded finance opportunities in their portfolio companies. And again there is a huge difference between different VCs. Some VCs, they don't understand it and I have to do a lot of very basic education. But there are some VCs, to give you an example, I have a close partnership with a fund called Mamba Growth Equity. It's a New York based fund that specifically has a thesis of investing in vertical SaaS companies that have an opportunity to embed and monetise financial services. So they speak the exact same language as I do, and we go after effectively the same types of companies and the same types of founders, and we help those founders with the embedded finance opportunities that they have and then make it happen post-investment.