Join the Debate: Retailers in Embedded Finance | Lending Moves from Glovo & Ageras

Hi embedded finance friend

Over the weekend, I was thinking about an idea for my newsletter during the quiet summer weeks, when I likely have little news to cover. Unfortunately, I haven’t worked it out yet, but it could have also been pretty handy for this edition: it was a quiet week in Embedded Finance. If you have any suggestions for me on what I could share when the news coverage is low, let me know ;)

Thanks to a couple of readers who pointed out a mistake in last week's edition: Even though it took eBay more than four years to bring its embedded lending partnership with Youlend from the UK to Germany, eBay Germany already launched a lending offering in collaboration with Iwoca in 2022.

Lastly, I am searching for our second and final sponsor for our upcoming Frankfurt event during the Digital Finance Accelerator on June 25th (Website). Is that you? Please ping me 🙂 

And now let’s dive in 👇

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Join the Debate: Retailers & Embedded Finance

Event page: Register here

I am hosting my first virtual event. You might remember my survey from a few weeks ago, where I asked you what topic you thought was suitable. The majority voted for a vertical in Embedded Finance. After some thinking, I opted for retailers in Embedded Finance, as it is a constant topic within the ecosystem, with multiple new launches and failures in the past few months. Even more importantly, the topic allows for a great debate where we can discuss the question from two sides.

I have included some more details on the event page linked above. I hope we will have a good mix of infrastructure providers, retailers, and experts joining. If you know somebody who fits well, please forward them the event link and invite them!

From Glovo to Ageras: Embedded Lending Is Quietly Spreading Across Europe

What happened: This week, two Embedded Lending companies shared partner updates: German Finmid published detailed insights about its partnership with food-delivery platform Glovo (Finmid). Swedish Froda announced that its collaboration with business tool provider Ageras will be expanded from Germany to Denmark (LinkedIn).

My comment: It seems businesses today have many more places to apply for funding (but not necessarily get) than a few years ago. I mentioned restaurants already in my previous newsletter. Almost every Tier 1 food delivery platform is offering a lending product: Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway (through different brands), and Glovo have partnered with companies like Banxware, Finmid, and Youlend (I probably missed a few names, but you get my point). Now that almost every platform (I haven’t found anything from Uber Eats and Foodora in Europe) has chosen its lending providers, it will be interesting to see if they all stick with their providers or if one/some of them is more fitting to the restaurant industry.

Ageras, on the other hand, seems to like working with Froda and is expanding from (the much larger?) German to Ageras’ home market, Denmark. Froda has made several partnership announcements over the past few months, but many were neobank-focused. Technically, even the partnership with Ageras in Germany is through a neobank as Froda is embedded into the freelancer neobank ‘Kontist by Ageras’. But since business tool provider Ageras owns Kontist, I guess you agree that this is relevant for Embedded Finance, even more so in Denmark, where Ageras does not offer a business banking product.

Does Seccl’s Fresh Funding Signal a Broader Shift in Investment-as-a-Service?

What happened: British investment-as-a-service provider Seccl has received new funding from its owner, Octopus (Finextra). Octopus is one part a financial service company and one part an energy provider in the UK, and it acquired Seccl in 2019.

My comment: The news is nothing major but represents something you see in the overall market. Seccl, its British competitor Wealthkernel, and its German counterparts Lemon Markets and Upvest have had multiple expansion and partnership announcements during the last few months (maybe more will follow during M2020?). Additionally, not only direct competitors but also similar providers such as Evergreen, Ginmon, and Sutor Bank have increased their focus on partnerships.

However, the focus of all these companies seems to remain mainly on companies from the financial service industry and not so much on non-financial brands. Embedded Investments tend to be one of the Embedded Finance areas with the lowest number of existing use cases. However, you can argue that infrastructure providers from banking and lending also started selling to fintech companies and banks before focusing on non-financial brands. So, perhaps we will soon see more announcements from HR tools, energy providers, and travel companies offering investment products.

In other Embedded Finance news

• Ant International announces its collaboration with HSBC (The Paypers)

• Affirm and Kayak expand partnership to Canada (Finextra)

• Galileo and Atomic unveil payment method switch tool (The Paypers)

• German automotive-focused Fintech firm Aufinity raises $26m in Series C funding

• Airwallex has raised $300 million in a Series F funding round, valuing the payments firm at $6.2 billion (Finextra).

• Not Embedded Finance at all, but today I learned that banks are expected to lose millions in interest due to SEPA Instant and liquidity requirements (Finextra).

Event Calendar

• June 12th, Online: Our very first virtual event focused on the opportunities and challenges for retailers in Embedded Finance [Register here]

• June 25th, Frankfurt: TechQuartier Digital Finance Accelerator - I will be hosting a Masterclass [More details]