Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 15. Published 12 December 2024. Guest: Sam Boboev, founder of the newsletter Fintech Wrap Up. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. My name is Lars Markull. This is our final episode of 2024, and we'll use it to take a short recap of what has happened in embedded finance in the last 12 months. My guest for this episode is Sam Boboev. Sam is the founder of the newsletter Fintech Wrap Up and a product manager at TPF. With Sam, I'm discussing our personal six biggest embedded finance stories in 2024, including the retailers, the role of traditional banks, and verticals in embedded finance. Let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hey Sam, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Sam Boboev: Hi Lars, thank you for having me at this podcast. Currently I am based in Malta. Originally I am from Uzbekistan, and it's been only eight months since I relocated to Malta. So I'm fairly new in this country, and it's quite a new experience and challenge for me.
Lars Markull: Interesting. I mean, obviously this episode we're going to take a little bit of a recap of what happened in embedded finance in 2024, but it also sounds like on your personal end there have been quite some changes in the last 12 months.
Sam Boboev: Absolutely. As I said, I moved to a new country. I got a new position in the payments industry here as a product manager. Also, I would say I took my newsletter up to a totally new level, and I started publishing a new version of my newsletter that's called Deep Dives. And also on my personal blog on LinkedIn, I think I made huge progress. The number of the followers has grown significantly, and a couple of weeks ago I was recognised as one of the top voices on LinkedIn.
Lars Markull: Amazing. I mean, that's basically how we connected, on LinkedIn. We had a couple of chats over the last couple of months, and at the year's closing, the typical kind of recaps of what has happened this year are quite common. In the past I've even written some of the pieces around embedded finance. This year I was a little bit too lazy to write something, so I said, hey, let's record a podcast. And obviously with your covering of what's happening in the fintech world, I thought it might be great to jam together what we have seen.
So actually Sam and I, as a preparation for this podcast, we looked a little bit at the last 12 months, what has happened in the world of embedded finance. Of course, for me quite easy in a way, just using my newsletter, going through a couple of stories that I've seen, and we decided what are the highlights, the big topics. Not focusing specifically on very specific news, but rather taking six headlines, six general developments, we have chosen to dive a little bit into. We're going to go through them one by one, and there's not really any particular order. It's just that while going through the year, we decided these six make more sense to talk about.
Retailers in embedded finance
Lars Markull: And to kick things off, the first one is retailers in embedded finance. And maybe to give the audience a little bit of a recap, what has happened the last 12 months. Both on the consumer or perhaps even on the wholesale side, we have seen a couple of developments. Not all of them were great, to be honest, as well.
I mean, I think in the European perspective, we have seen specifically two British retailers, Sainsbury's and Tesco, who have their own bank licence and financial service offering as a whole, both of them decided to part ways. Sainsbury's Bank sold themselves to NatWest, Tesco Bank to Barclays. So they basically decided it's not something they want to offer anymore.
On the other hand, also another little bit of a negative news, so to say, for the embedded finance world, is the Swiss retailer Coop, who actually launched the year before their banking product Coop Finance+ and then just wound it down like nine months later, earlier this year. So those were, I'd say, probably three news items which have a little bit more of a negative touch, which probably presents very well the challenges that retailers have around embedded finance.
And then there were obviously some good news as well. Hemköp, the Swedish retailer, announced their first bank account offering in partnership with SEB Embedded. I'm going to talk about SEB Embedded a little bit later as well. Then we have seen another British retailer, Currys, in the electronics space, expanding their buy now, pay later offering together with BNP Paribas, and John Lewis also partnering with a fintech to offer a lending product. So we also see a couple of companies entering the space.