Consumers’ growing willingness to get their financial services from non-FI providers is spurring consumer brands to embed financial elements in their products and services. But this new form of finance will mean dramatic changes for incumbent and startup FIs.

eBay rolls out lending to UK SMBs: The ecommerce giant is partnering with embedded finance platform YouLend to extend loans to its sellers—giving the former a chance to make itself stickier for platform sellers and the latter access to data and loan growth.

eBay seeks to plug small business financing gap with an embedded lending product for its UK SMB sellers. eBay and other ecommerce firms will likely add more financial services, like accounting solutions, to better serve their user bases.

Some of its competitors are moving toward embedded finance, another potential growth area for Plaid. In September, open banking competitor Tink teamed up with energy provider Enel X to fuel the development of personal finance management tools for the latter’s end users.

The emergence of digital banking in recent years has given rise to BaaS and embedded finance. BaaS enables banks and fintechs to offer their services to third parties, while embedded finance enables financial products to be weaved into nonfinancial platforms.

Tech companies with charters may also covet revenue from embedded finance, a space where financial institutions now provide software that backs nonbanks’ products.

Its offerings include an embedded finance bank account solution (Stripe Treasury), lending (Stripe Capital), and a corporate credit card—many of the solutions a bank might provide a small business. One offering that sets Stripe apart is Stripe Treasury, which was introduced in December 2020 and involves a Stripe-made API.

The nature of the planned PS5 integration is not yet public, but it’s likely that Discord will be deeply embedded into the experience. Given the rapid rise of social audio, it’s probably not a bad investment either. The bigger picture: Although Discord’s recent growth has been aided by the pandemic, it already had a large user base of 70 million in December 2019.

December 2020 polling by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows how deeply embedded digital tools are in everyday life.

Consumers are averse to spending much time on their finances: US consumers spend, on average, just over an hour on finances per month, versus 85 hours watching television, per an Ascent study.

Most mobile time is in the five categories we detailed above, but a variety of other areas attract significant attention, including shopping, dating, finance, travel, fitness, navigation, and so on—the list is long. During the pandemic, a few of these categories contracted, such as travel, while others boomed, like ecommerce, fitness, and home finance.

And I'm leading an effort right now to make sure we have a well-defined and well-articulated corporate strategy, and that our product strategy is embedded in that. Every CMO leans to a certain area, and I've always positioned myself as a strategic CMO, but also one who understands product very well—which is vitally important to an early-stage technology company.

However, a personalized ad, email or brochure about finance, healthcare or travel would require human expertise. Despite its limitations, MT has become central to many companies’ globalization and localization strategies.