Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 47. Published 28 May 2026. Guest: Mark Holleman, co-founder of Thred. Host: Lars Markull.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Mark Holleman: Hi Lars. Thanks for having me back. I am doing all right. I am based in Amsterdam, in sunny Amsterdam. Not really, but sunny.
From embedded lending to embedded accounting
Lars Markull: That's nice. And you did say already thanks for having me again. Some listeners will know, and you are going to be the first one on my podcast who appears a second time as a guest. So thank you for joining me again.
It was a couple of months ago, or last year I think, when we recorded an episode around the topic of embedded lending, specifically the buy versus build motion of launching an embedded finance product for brands, but maybe also for fintechs. Obviously before that you were a founder of Sprinque, a company actually operating in the space, helping other companies to offer lending products. Already in the last episode Sprinque was in the process of shutting down, so that chapter is closed.
Now we're going to talk about something very different. Still embedded, but not embedded lending any more, embedded accounting. And people who know me well will probably say, okay, embedded accounting, it's not really embedded finance, it sits a little bit out there. But obviously we all know there's a lot of similarities and things we can learn from that.
But maybe to kick things off, we're going to talk about what you're doing with Thred and a few more details. High level, earlier you were doing lending, now you moved into the accounting stack. What was the main reason, the main driver, for you to focus on this new vertical?
Mark Holleman: It's a good question. As we built Sprinque, the previous startup that I ran, we noticed just how out of date and how old-fashioned the whole process still was of doing your administration and keeping your books up to date, and basically even building your whole finance stack, and how the finance stack and the finance setup fails if the foundation isn't there, if the data isn't correct in the accounting system.
All the stuff you do above it, all the things you try to do, forecast your runway, build models, get insight into your spending and so forth, all of that fails if the foundation isn't there. And typically books are updated once a month, or even once a quarter when you need to do VAT filings. That means you're kind of flying blind in the periods between now and that date.
So that was one side. And the other side, of course, we were underwriting small businesses and we just realised how difficult it is to get up-to-date financials on small businesses, on SMEs. So that's the problem we saw from both sides, and that's why we decided, me and Manoj, to focus on this problem specifically.
Lars Markull: And we're going to talk a bit more about what embedded accounting means. I guess listeners to this podcast who know the embedded finance world can imagine something where we're talking about companies like SaaS companies, vertical SaaS companies, who can embed accounting features. But coming back to the answer you gave before, you saw the problem. How did you then think, okay, embedded accounting is a solution to this problem? How did you arrive at that one?
Mark Holleman: Yeah, it came in a process. We noticed the problem was there, and we noticed it over the four years that we built Sprinque. And as we got bigger, we also switched accounting systems, from Yuki to Exact, and changed bookkeepers, and got external controllers, part-time controllers, in to help us make sense of all the data and get it up to date.
So the problem was always there. But at some point it just clicked, especially when we started to think about how do we solve the problem for those smaller businesses? Not per se for bigger companies or bigger SMEs, but really the small ones, under a million a year in revenue or under five hundred thousand a year in revenue. How do you reach those companies? And do they really then need a standalone tool? Because basically SMEs already have to operate a number of different tools to manage their business. Or is there a way to simplify their lives and bring the accounting to where the data already is?
Vertical SaaS and SME banking are perfect channels for that, because businesses already use those tools on a daily basis. They already manage their businesses, especially for vertical SaaS. They manage their business there, the operational data is there. So it made a lot of sense to say, okay, why don't we bring the whole accounting and bookkeeping functionality into that environment rather than have a separate solution? It's also possible as a separate solution, but there is a benefit to having it where, especially these smaller businesses, already work every day and manage their day-to-day operations.
What embedding accounting actually looks like
Lars Markull: You mentioned already the case of a vertical SaaS, one piece of software often referred to as business critical software, most likely an ERP or a similar kind of service, which obviously by definition contains a lot of data, a lot of financial data. The similar example you gave with SME banking is probably for different types of companies, or even the same type of companies, another software that has all this information.
But maybe just for all of us to understand very clearly, what does it mean when these companies embed accounting? I'm guessing we can take a business critical software like an ERP, and accounting on the side, whereas now it's the same company doing it embedded. Obviously the difference is using one tool instead of two, but maybe you can explain a little bit more around that. How does it look in the user journey, and the feature set you have inside of your software?
Mark Holleman: Yeah. So essentially it means, let's say you have a vertical SaaS, a yoga studio management platform where you schedule your meetings, you have your team members, you schedule the classes and so forth, you do the invoicing to your members et cetera. So you already have all that functionality there.
But now normally that data would then have to go out of that platform to whatever accounting or bookkeeping software your accountant uses or you use. Not always does that connection exist, so you would have to manually download the data from the platform, send it to your bookkeeper, who then manually uploads it into the accounting software, and then does all his or her processes from there to create the journal entries.
So the difference here is that we have a set of APIs that we give to the platform. They can send all this operational data to us. We then also have an SDK, a front-end element, which you can drop inside the product, so you can see all your transactions there. You can connect your bank accounts there. You can basically see all the reporting there, all the insights on your performance. You can see it all in one place, and the data gets updated in real time.
So it's not that you have insight into the financial position of your company once a month or once a quarter, whenever you send this data to your bookkeeper and whenever they then upload it and do the reconciliation and all the bookings and everything. But this is continuous. So first of all you get better insight, all the functionality is in one place.
And that's very interesting also for, let's say, that yoga studio platform, that if somebody wants to start a yoga studio they can go to that platform and have a business in a box concept. They can get the whole business set up in one place from one provider, and they don't have to worry about setting up two, three, four or five different things, they can do everything in one place. So that's the benefit there.
So what we mean is, we have a set of APIs, we get all that data continuously, we run your bookkeeping and your admin in real time, your back office automation in real time. You get the reporting back. And if there are any gaps, or anything is missing, we make little flags, little tasks inside the vertical SaaS interface, where you can resolve these things. Let's say you bought something and you didn't upload the receipt. There's immediately a little task created saying, hey, we see that you spent this money but we don't have a receipt, so we can't complete the process, can you please attach it here? And then we take care of it. So you can have continuous bookkeeping and real-time insight. And that's really the benefit, as a first step.
Full service bookkeeping, done by agents
Lars Markull: And do you see these examples you provide right now, I've seen it in the past, dealing in my time in open banking and also embedded banking, very often with accounting, bookkeeping kind of services. Obviously people who have to deal with it on a daily basis know exactly what it means. For a lot of people it's sometimes a very vague term, what does it exactly entail. Maybe you can give a couple of examples of what your software precisely does on top of the data you mentioned. Reconciliation, receipt collection. Is this the typical service, and where does your service end?
Mark Holleman: Yeah, so we do essentially full service bookkeeping and accounting. So that means your bookkeeping, your VAT returns, as well as your annual filings if they are required as a company, your annual accounts and your corporate income tax filings. So we handle all of that, and we base all of that on the data that is updated in real time.
So the model becomes much more efficient in the sense that it is done automatically. This is this whole concept of services becoming the new software, that you can take the software and the human services on top and basically replace them with a piece of software that saves everybody time and money.