Hi from Berlin,
If you are reading this in a hotel room in Amsterdam: Enjoy M20/20 Europe and hope you have enough energy for the upcoming days. I have decided to skip it this year, but I will definitely have FOMO when I see all the LinkedIn posts this week.
Fintech Drinks and Stories @ Berlin: We are hosting another casual evening with our friends from Airwallex, Debtist, and House of Finance & Tech. Drinks, food, and good conversations on embedded finance, payments, and the wider fintech infrastructure space. If you are in Berlin next Thursday (June 11th), join us. Register here
SAS launches a new business credit card. Is it a co-brand or something else?
SAS has launched the EuroBonus Executive Business Card, its first business credit card for small and medium-sized enterprises across Scandinavia. SAS is the Scandinavian airline group, marking its 80th anniversary this year, with EuroBonus as its long-running loyalty program. The card combines a credit line with EuroBonus loyalty benefits, travel perks, and an app that integrates expense and receipt management with ERP systems. The program is operated by SAS under the EuroBonus umbrella, with the Swedish credit institution Nordiska providing the Cards-as-a-Service infrastructure for issuance and credit, and the Danish fintech Cardlay providing the app and expense management.
An airline launches a new card, so I guess we all assume it's a co-branded card. Especially when the language in the press release says the same. But is it actually a standard co-brand or something else? It seems a new spectrum is emerging. At one end sit the traditional bank-led co-brands, where the bank wins a tender, issues the card, and owns the product roadmap. Lufthansa Miles & More and SAS's previous EuroBonus cards with SEB and Diners are exactly that. At the other end sit the fully embedded cards we see in vertical SaaS, where the platform owns the customer relationship, and the card is one feature inside a much wider product. SAS sits somewhere in between, alongside the Porsche Card on Nordiska and Enfuce. The brand operates the program directly, while the regulated entity sits in the background. Not pure embedded finance, but not a traditional co-brand either. Maybe a new category that is still forming.
Vattenfall picks EFS, the embedded finance arm of Enpal, for solar and heat pump financing
Energy company Vattenfall and Berlin-based fintech EFS have entered a strategic partnership to embed financing into Vattenfall's sales process for solar and heat pumps in Germany. Vattenfall is one of Europe's largest energy companies, with around 13 million customers across the continent. EFS is a fintech focused exclusively on financing decentralised energy solutions such as photovoltaic systems and heat pumps, and operates as an independent subsidiary of the Enpal Group, Germany's largest solar installer. When a homeowner gets a Vattenfall consultation, the salesperson generates an instalment purchase offer through the EFS platform during the same conversation. A real-time credit check occurs without interrupting the sales process, and the customer signs a digital contract on the spot. After installation, EFS pays the full system price to the partner, and the customer pays monthly instalments to EFS over a term of up to 25 years.
So why pick a specialist? The obvious candidates for embedding financing in a sales process like this would have been horizontal BNPL providers like Klarna or Riverty, or large consumer banks with point-of-sale lending products. Vattenfall went with neither. The thesis behind vertical-specialist lenders is that solar systems and heat pumps are not consumer goods bought at checkout. The ticket is high, often €15,000-€40,000. The duration is long, with terms reaching 20 to 25 years. A horizontal lender reviews credit bureau data and asks whether the customer can afford the current monthly payment. A vertical specialist also factors in the energy savings the installation is expected to generate, because the system itself produces part of the cash flow that services the loan. For Vattenfall, choosing a specialist over a generalist signals that this segment of consumer credit has become its own category.
In other Embedded Finance news
- Orenda Finance secures Dutch EMI licence: The London & Amsterdam-based embedded finance orchestrator, founded in 2020 by Joshua Vittori, has obtained an e-money institution licence from the Dutch Central Bank. Orenda previously sat atop third-party-regulated providers, offering no-code orchestration and a frontend layer to its clients. With the EMI, Orenda is now a program manager and licensed e-money issuer rolled into one, a meaningful shift for the program management category. (Osborne Clarke)
- Marqeta and Banking Circle partner to expand card issuing across Europe: Marqeta is teaming up with Banking Circle to bring its account and money movement tools to 30 new European countries, building on a reported eightfold growth in European processing volume between 2022 and 2025 and last year's acquisition of TransactPay. (PYMNTS)
- Mews embeds Uber into its hotel operating system: Hotels using Mews can now request, track, and bill Uber rides for guests and staff inside the same platform they already use for everything else, with the integration launching as a pilot later this year. Mews is well known as a heavy embedder of financial services, and this is a reminder that the embedded model is spreading beyond finance into the wider hotel workflow. (PYMNTS)
- OpenFX acquires Amsterdam-based Embed to expand cross-border payments across Europe: The US-based cross-border payments company is picking up Embed's Dutch Payment Institution licence (with EU passporting) and UK Electronic Money Institution licence. Embed's team, led by Alex Schoonkind (a former EFR podcast guest), will form the core of OpenFX's new London and Amsterdam offices. (OpenFX)
- Aazzur partners with Corpay Cross-Border on embedded global payments: Berlin-based embedded finance orchestration platform Aazzur is integrating Corpay's cross-border infrastructure to give its non-financial brand customers access to multi-currency accounts, FX, and international payouts directly inside their existing product flows. (The Paypers)
That's it for this edition. If you enjoy my newsletter, podcast, or events, the best way to support me is to share them with others in your network. Feedback is always welcome, too.
Need help with an embedded finance project? Visit my website and let's talk.
Best wishes from Berlin,
Lars Markull (LinkedIn)
