Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 28. Published 8 July 2025. Guest: Marcel Mansfeld, co-founder and CPO of ToolTime. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: There are many hot areas within embedded finance, but vertical software as a service companies tend to launch embedded finance products much sooner than anybody else, which makes a lot of sense if you understand that vertical software as a service companies aggregate functionalities from different areas into one solution for one specific target audience.
In this podcast I speak with Marcel Mansfeld, the co-founder and CPO of ToolTime. ToolTime targets businesses in the German craft industry, and its software includes features such as time tracking, documentation, quotes and invoices. Last year the company launched ToolTime Pay, a digital payment product, and embedded finance was in the founders' heads since the beginning.
In the podcast we speak about ToolTime's journey in embedded finance, what Marcel and his team learned about offering financial products, and his advice for fellow founders. My name is Lars Markull and this is the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. Every two weeks I interview the builders and shapers of embedded finance.
A quick reminder from my side. At Embedded Finance Review I publish weekly newsletters, a biweekly podcast, and host in-person and virtual industry events. You can find out more about all these activities on our website, embeddedfinancereview.com. In addition, I also work with non-financial brands, infrastructure providers and banks in understanding, designing and launching their embedded finance products. If you're interested in working with me, visit the Embedded Finance Review website and reach out. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Marcel, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Marcel Mansfeld: Hi Lars, thank you for having me. I'm doing fine. I'm in Berlin, I guess as you are too.
Lars Markull: Exactly, which we just learned in the chat before. We are almost neighbours here in Berlin, but yeah, still doing a remote recording.
Marcel Mansfeld: Yeah. Time to meet for coffee. Definitely.
What ToolTime solves for the trades
Lars Markull: Let's do that. Let's do that. But before that, let's dive into the episode. Marcel, with ToolTime you are providing a digital solution for the craft industry. So, as it's commonly referred to, maybe as a vertical SaaS play, maybe you can say business critical software solutions for one specific industry.
Obviously in such a company you typically offer a wide range of features, but very often there's also one that stands out, that's the most important one for the target audience. Is it also the case with you? Maybe you can highlight what the biggest pain point was, especially at the very beginning with ToolTime, that you solved for your customers?
Marcel Mansfeld: Yeah, a great question. Obviously it is a variety of topics. It's hard to pinpoint one single reason why customers would use ToolTime. Obviously digitisation is a big driver behind everything. So by now the entire industry has understood the advantages of digitising the business.
One of the main promises of ToolTime is to go completely paperless, or paper free, in the office, right? So in the past, tradespeople would basically work with paper as an exchange between the office and, for example, the workers in the field at the customer's site. They would write down and document their stuff on paper, that piece of paper would need to go back to the office to produce an invoice afterwards. And there's many examples where this piece of paper has been lost, and then the business would never be able to write an invoice. I think that's one of the biggest advantages.
And obviously there's also regulatory change. In Germany especially, we have seen the introduction of e-invoices. That is obviously also a driver, that there's new regulation that just describes how you have to digitally write an invoice in the future and so on. I think there are many avenues to why ToolTime is just a good choice for tradespeople.