Worldpay vs. Stripe & Adyen: Can they catch up in embedded finance?

Hi {{first name|embedded finance friend}}

There is a lot of event activity on my end these days:

Additionally, I am finalising the details for our last in-person event of 2025, which will happen in Berlin. You can already block the evening of November 19th. Details will hopefully follow soon.

And now let’s dive in 👇

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Did you know that property managers in Germany spend hours every day just figuring out which tenants have paid rent?

In my latest podcast episode, Marcel Meitza from getmomo explains how his vertical fintech is solving the €30+ billion problem by building banking infrastructure specifically for real estate.

Key insights:

You can find the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Move over Adyen and Stripe, there is a new sheriff in town. At least, that's how the team at Worldpay would like to frame the narrative, I guess. But what happened? The international payment provider Worldpay has announced a new Embedded Finance offering in the US, where it launched banking and lending products in partnership with Unit (Worldpay).

Before this launch, Worldpay was a pure payment company, enabling its customers to accept payments. When this customer was, for example, a platform or a Vertical SaaS provider, then Worldpay enabled the business's customers of this platform or Vertical SaaS provider to accept payments from their own clients. This is what we would describe as Embedded Payments, and is referred to as 'Money in' in the image. Now, Worldpay also offers Embedded Banking ("Manage my money"), Embedded Lending ("Get capital") and corporate spend management features ("Money out"). The platform or vertical SaaS provider can now also offer bank accounts, loans and other features through the usage of Worldpay.

Adyen and Stripe are globally the two payment providers that likely have the most extensive Embedded Finance offerings (in terms of breadth of features). With one partnership and announcement, Worldpay is aiming to close this gap.

The biggest surprise in this announcement for me is that Worldpay chose Unit as the underlying provider. Don't get me wrong, I am impressed by what the Unit team is building, and they already have some significant partnerships in place. However, Worldpay is on another level, and especially becomes the one provider that enables such a massive company to manage banking, lending, and corporate expenses (Worldpay processes 80% more transactions than Stripe, according to Unit's CEO).

But this partnership with Unit also signals one thing: this is a US-only feature, as Unit is currently focusing on its home market. Through quick research, I found that Worldpay's revenue and payment volume are approximately 70-80% from the US, with the remaining 20-30% spread across all other 149 markets in which the company operates (Payments Dive). Thus, this fact, combined with the partnership with the US-only Unit, suggests that Worldpay's Embedded Finance will remain US-only for the time being.

Can Worldpay's Embedded Finance offering actually compete with Adyen and Stripe? I guess we will find out. Their competitors have invested considerable time and resources in their banking and lending activities. Therefore, I would have my doubts that Worldpay can win the current customers of Stripe and Adyen. However, perhaps this launch is not so much aimed at winning new customers as it is at reducing the number of customers leaving Worldpay to obtain additional Embedded Finance features?

Before this product launch, a Worldpay customer who wanted to offer banking or lending products would either need to find a provider to integrate in addition to the Worldpay integration or migrate to Adyen and Stripe for all their embedded needs. There are pros and cons to each approach; however, I am sure Worldpay lost a few interesting customers due to the missing Embedded Finance features.

I am curious how the Worldpay Embedded Finance product offering will perform. What's your take? Is this a defensive move to stop the bleeding, or the beginning of a serious challenge to Adyen and Stripe's dominance?

Reverb, the online marketplace for musical instruments and gear, launched a digital wallet powered by US wallet provider Ansa. The concept is straightforward: sellers keep their earnings in the wallet instead of transferring to their bank account, then use those funds to buy more gear on the platform. For that, they receive 1% cash back as an incentive (Ansa).

If I were to quote our previous virtual event guest, Christian von Hammel-Bonten, this is the typical playbook for keeping money within your business as long as possible. When a seller lists their guitar, makes a sale, and then immediately buys another guitar from someone else on Reverb, the platform never has to process an external payout, resulting in lower payment costs, more transactions, and higher retention.

I don’t live in the US and am not really into instruments, so I first thought Reverb is likely a small niche marketplace. Well, the marketplace processes around $1 billion annually with 10 million monthly visitors. The question is whether sellers actually want to keep their money on the platform or prefer the flexibility of having it in their bank account.

Ansa is positioning itself as the infrastructure provider for marketplace wallets. They handle wallet functionality, the promotions engine (such as 1% cashback), and the instant payout mechanics. Use cases like this are a perfect fit for them. I recall that in our podcast episode #24, I spoke with Arda Cagaptay about potential use cases for wallets.

The interesting part is whether this wallet actually changes seller behaviour. A 1% incentive isn't huge. However, for a musician who wants to sell one item and immediately (or soon after) buy another, the use case makes a lot of sense.

I'm curious to see if other marketplaces follow this playbook or if the wallet approach only works in specific verticals where repeat transactions are common.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this edition.

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Best wishes from Berlin,

Lars Markull (LinkedIn)