Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 11. Published 18 October 2024. Guest: Sarina Deuble, associate partner at McKinsey. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: Welcome to the Embedded Finance Review Podcast. My name is Lars Markull. Today I'm speaking with Sarina Deuble, who is an associate partner at McKinsey. She works with banks and fintech players across Europe and Asia. Her special focus includes embedded finance and banking as a service. I'm speaking with Sarina about the potential for banks with embedded finance, and if every bank actually needs an embedded finance strategy. We also cover the role of big tech and how different partnership models work. Let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Sarina. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located at the moment?
Sarina Deuble: Hello. Many, many thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here today with you. Doing actually fantastic, thanks for asking. Today I'm in Frankfurt, which is actually a little bit rare for me because my work often brings me to different countries, so it's nice to be home also for a change now.
Lars Markull: Great. And today, obviously, we're gonna talk a lot about embedded finance. And in the introduction, I spoke already about your background with McKinsey, that you focus on topics around embedded finance and banking-as-a-service. So quite obviously, you spend a lot of time around these things. So maybe to kick things off, what's your personal excitement about embedded finance? What do you think is really interesting that it's worthwhile spending so much time on it?
Why embedded finance
Sarina Deuble: Yeah. That's actually really a great question. So my fascination about finance goes actually back as long as I can more or less remember. Not just actually to my first days at the bank, where I spent almost 15 years ago.
And what really excites me about embedded finance is literally the way how it reshapes how we live. When I first saw fintechs building those early concepts, which is almost 10 years ago, so those mock-ups, so these business ideas, something also clicked with me. Because it was literally just a new way of banking, right? It was a new way of living, and it was like, how do we make payments not a separate painful task, but how can we literally really seamlessly embed this as part of experience? So I guess sometimes you need a bit of a buzzword like embedded finance to capture this movement that we have experienced in the last years, and that's what happened. So the revolution was there, and we just have now given it a name.