If you haven’t read Matt Brown’s piece “B2B payments aren’t payments, they’re workflows”, you should really do so. He makes a great point that companies that want to win B2B payments shouldn’t aim for that in the first move but rather create “an overall 10x better product” while focusing on adjacent needs around payments.
The post made me think. And I realized something about a number of non-financial brands I interacted with over the past few months. Some of these non-financial companies should build fintech products, but they also shouldn’t build fintech products. This sounds confusing, doesn’t it? When I say they should build a fintech product, I mean that they should go down the road of embedded finance and offer financial products (no surprise here). When I say they shouldn’t build fintech products, I mean that they shouldn’t build a separate fintech venture but rather a truly embedded experience.
Some of these non-financial companies decided to build and launch a fintech product, and many of them aimed to build a superior fintech product. But they did spend very little or no time at all building the bridge between their non-financial product and their fintech product. While doing so, they are likely running into the same problems that pure fintech companies have faced before. So if you are embarking on the journey of building a fintech product at your non-financial company, please make sure that both worlds are linked and supporting each other’s growth.
