Hi from sunny Berlin,
Welcome to a totally new version of my newsletter. I mentioned that I wanted to rework the newsletter over the summer, but as it happens, I am already testing the new format today.
Cadence: Instead of sending weekly round-ups on all things Embedded Finance, I am planning to send one edition per month, each focused on a core financial product. The newsletter will remain weekly, but each edition will focus on either Lending, Payments, or Banking (I am still working out what happens in the fourth week of the month).
Format: I still cover big and small news, but it's all merged into a single news segment. Additionally, I added a 'From EFR' and a 'Builder' section.
Once the themed editions go live properly, you will be able to choose which ones you receive. I am still testing all of this, so please share your feedback by clicking the thumbs-up or thumbs-down at the bottom of this email, or reach out to me directly.
This edition starts with Embedded Lending, since most of what I was covering this week was lending anyway. Whether the remaining July editions already follow the new format, I have not decided yet, but if the feedback is positive, this will become the new standard after the summer break (likely September).
Now let's dive in!
Building something in embedded finance? Whether you are a brand comparing providers, an enabler working through your go-to-market strategy, or a team trying to fill a crucial (fintech) role, my office hours are a free call to talk it through. I share my honest read and, where it helps, intros to my network.
News
The biggest stories of the month, smaller news in brief, and updates on stories I covered earlier.
Just Eat Takeaway.com and YouLend cross €150m in restaurant financing
The programme has supported more than 13,500 financings for restaurants and takeaways across seven European markets since launching in the UK in 2022, in the aftermath of the COVID lockdowns. The delivery group connects consumers with 362,000 partners across 15 countries, while its financing partner runs merchant lending for companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopify. The announcement contains one detail that says more about the programme's maturity than the €150m itself, and that detail concerns who is borrowing. Read the full story
Otto Market sellers get financing up to €5m through Banxware
Germany's second-largest e-commerce marketplace, home to more than 6,000 sellers and €7bn in GMV, now offers its sellers financing from €1k to €5m, with payouts in as little as 1 to 3 business days. The announcement makes official what has quietly been running since autumn 2025. So why does a company with its own regulated payments entity buy its lending from a fintech? Read the full story
Other Embedded Lending Stories
Pluxee Romania adds merchant financing with PragmaGO: Merchants accepting Pluxee's employee benefits cards in Romania can now access up to 250,000 lei (around €50k) in working capital through PragmaCash, with credit decisions typically issued within one business day and repayment via a fixed daily debit. Pluxee is the fourth distribution partner PragmaGO has lined up in Romania alongside Netopia, Glovo, and Gomag, after the Polish SME lender acquired and rebranded local player Omnicredit. (Piata Financiara)
Inbank enters Greece through a 50/50 joint venture with Eurobank: The Estonian embedded finance provider and the Greek bank will build a platform offering BNPL, sales finance and consumer lending products to merchants in Greece. The partners are applying to the Bank of Greece for a local Credit Company licence, with commercial launch expected in Q1 2027. (Inbank)
Jifiti CEO Yaacov Martin on white-label lending and agentic AI: In a profile interview, Martin traces how the company pivoted from a 2011 gift registry into an embedded lending platform for banks and lenders, deliberately staying a technology enabler rather than becoming a lender itself. He names IKEA as the flagship programme, with branded point-of-sale financing across multiple countries and regulated local banks in each market, and argues that the next shift is agentic AI distribution, where lending products must be discoverable within AI ecosystems. (Pulse 2.0)
From EFR
Insights, events, and conversations from Embedded Finance Review.
Embedded lending: hype or reality? What 25 practitioners think: More than 15 embedded lending launches crossed my desk in the first half of the year, so we put the question to the people following EFR: are these announcements the start of something bigger? Around 25 practitioners joined the virtual event, with Temi Ofong (HSBC) and Nicolas Kipp (Credibur) anchoring the conversation. The discussion covered why launches outpace adoption, what separates a good platform from a bad one, whether lending actually grows GMV, and the one advantage the room agreed will decide who wins. Read the full recap
Why solar installers are becoming lenders: With embedded lending as this edition's theme, one episode worth revisiting is my 2024 conversation with Peder Broms, co-founder and CEO of Cloover. The company provides software and instalment financing for renewable energy installers, targeting the 85% of installations carried out by SMEs, with an approval process closer to Klarna than to a bank branch. We covered how installers create financing offers inside their existing tools, why Cloover works only through installation partners, and how the funding side works behind the scenes. Listen to the episode
Builder
One person building in this space, and their take on it.
Nicolas Kipp, Credibur: Few people in European lending have seen the market from as many angles as Nicolas Kipp. Nicolas was Chief Risk Officer at Ratepay, co-founded the embedded lending provider Banxware, and in late 2024 started Credibur, a Berlin-based company building infrastructure for the funding side of non-bank lending: the debt facilities between lenders and institutional capital providers that still largely run on spreadsheets. He also anchored last week's virtual event on embedded lending (see above), which made him the obvious first pick for this new segment. I asked him for his hot takes on where embedded lending actually stands:
Embedded lending has grown up. The experimentation phase is over. Three years ago the question was whether you could even get credit to the checkout. Today almost every large consumer brand has something live, and many are pulling it back in-house to optimise it. The competition has moved from 'do we have a feature' to 'what does it cost us'.
His second take moves the argument from product to capital:
Cost of funding decides this now, not conversion. Banks and large debt funds are finally available as capital providers; that wasn't true two years ago. So embedded lending becomes a margin business. If you're not optimising your funding down to basis points, you lose. The days when a conversion uplift justified any price of capital are gone.
You can find Nicolas on LinkedIn.
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)
