Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 26. Published 10 June 2025. Guest: Mark Hollemann, independent advisor and former co-founder of Sprinque. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Embedded lending is pretty hot these days. There's hardly an Embedded Finance Review newsletter edition where I don't cover a non-financial brand launching a new lending product, and this includes companies targeting restaurants, hotels, gyms, e-commerce sellers, and many more. But how are these companies offering the lending product? Do they choose the build or the buy approach, and what do these approaches entail?
In this episode I speak with Mark Hollemann. Mark was one of the co-founders of Sprinque, an embedded lending provider which had a strong focus on B2B buy now, pay later. Sprinque was operating all over Europe with customers from various industries, but it did not work out, and Mark and his team had to make the difficult decision to wind down the company. Today, Mark is working as an independent advisor and is helping companies to build and launch lending products.
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. And a quick reminder from my side. At Embedded Finance Review, we not only publish weekly newsletters, a biweekly podcast and host in-person and virtual industry events. In addition, we also work with non-financial brands, infrastructure providers, and banks in understanding, designing and launching their embedded finance products. If you are interested in working with us, visit our website and reach out. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hey Mark, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Mark Hollemann: Hi. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm based here in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.
Lars Markull: And yeah, today is a special day for Amsterdam, at least for the fintech folks, I guess. We are recording this on the 3rd of June, so it's the first day of Money20/20. Are you attending?
Mark Hollemann: No, I'm not attending. I have attended in the past, back in 2022 I think. For us, the side events are more interesting than the actual main event. And it's quite a big investment, so you really have to be very clear on what you want to get out of it. Otherwise just stick to the side events.
Lars Markull: I just want to say, the frugal advice for startups, especially in the early stages anyway, just come to Amsterdam, get a cheap hostel or a cheap room, and just go to all the side events. Obviously the main conference is really good as well, but if you don't have the budget, you can at least get something out of the side events as well.
Mark Hollemann: Yes, I agree. It is a great event that is very well organised. It's just very expensive. You have to know what you want to get out of it.
What Sprinque built, and why it wound down
Lars Markull: Mark, thanks for joining. Today we're going to talk quite a bit about the whole topic of embedded lending. Before diving into the nitty gritty details, Mark, you were, or you are, a co-founder of Sprinque. Sprinque was offering a B2B financing product, basically also like B2B buy now, pay later. You had to close down the company, or you are shutting down the company at the moment. But obviously you have seen quite a lot. So maybe you can share a little bit what you learned with Sprinque while building Sprinque and maybe even while shutting down the company.
Mark Hollemann: Yeah, we obviously learned a lot. It was an exciting four year journey. We founded the company back in early 2021, coming from the Antler programme in Amsterdam, where I met my co-founders, Juan and Manoj. It was an amazing journey. Four years. We built a great team, a great product. We got great customers, so everything worked there. But in the end, in the current investment climate, it just wasn't enough. Investors are looking for something different, something more capital efficient, that grows faster.
But lending, you can't just grow at any rate that you like. You have to take it carefully, you have to take it slowly. So we learned a lot. One of the things we learned is that building a lending platform is complicated, especially one that goes into the checkout of a merchant where you have to make credit decisions and fraud decisions in a matter of seconds. Costly and very complicated to build.
Another thing we learned is that distribution is critical. If the volume isn't there, then you have a problem. Like I said with lending, you want to take it slowly. It's also something investors don't particularly like. It's easy to give people money. It's easy to pay out, to make loans. The complicated part is to get it back. And the critical part is to get all of it back, or most of it back, in good order, so you can redeploy it and obviously don't lose money.
Europe is a difficult market. It looks like the European Union, it looks like one market, but in reality it really isn't one market. It's fragmented, and you end up with a lot of different local winners. You end up with a German winner and a French winner and a British winner and a Dutch winner and so forth, which further fragments the market. It makes it difficult to get access to that volume that you need to grow your platform. So that's some of the challenges that we faced.
Growth, even though we did achieve a hundred thousand a month in MRR, so we were above the 1 million ARR, things like that. We did achieve that. We achieved 30% month on month growth for certain periods of time. But yeah, it just wasn't enough. It's such a capital intensive and such a long process that in the end we had to shut it down, and that process is now almost complete.