Embedded finance is the revenue driver and so much more | Leaders in Payments Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. Joining me today is a very special guest, Whitney Ganibegovic, a Senior Sales Executive at Worldpay, now part of Global Payments. So, Whitney, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. 

Thank you. Super happy to be here. 

This episode is part of our Signal series where we're cutting through the noise to reveal what truly matters in payments in Fintech. In this episode, we're talking about why embedded finance is becoming a real driver of retention, growth, and long-term value for ISVs and software platforms. We'll explore what happens when platforms move beyond payments to offer more financial tools and why products like business banking, working capital, and debit cards can make customers more loyal and harder to lose. We'll also look at why this is a much bigger strategic opportunity than many platforms realize. So, Whitney, before we dive deep into this topic, can you walk us through your professional journey and how you got to Worldpay? 

Yeah, thanks, Greg. A little bit of a unique journey for me. So, I actually started in business-to-business sales right out of school when most of my friends were looking to land jobs at big name companies with the 401k. I got and took the advice to just master sales, and it will take me anywhere. So, I actually spent my first two years, my professional career selling office supplies to 50 businesses a day. As tough as it was, I'm so grateful for it because when I did transition into an established organization, it was obvious the skills that are developed, you know, when you're pitching and talking to 50 different businesses a day that aren't expecting you. So, from there, I got the opportunity to start in a startup for working capital and quickly grew to manage that sales team that expanded from Australia to the US, looking to drive kind of a different approach to factoring in business where we're doing sales-based repayments. So, after that, I was recruited by our investment bank to join their treasury group, working with some of the bank's largest clients, which was a role I really, really loved participating in. But a former boss had reached out about Worldpay and their embedded finance program that was being built. And it was kind of the perfect intersection of everything I'd done. So, I went for it and I'm super grateful that Worldpay saw me as a fit because it's really been a great match, and I feel, you know, genuinely like I'm a fit for exactly where I'm meant to be. 

Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. So, most of our audience will be familiar with Worldpay, obviously, which is now, as everyone knows, part of Global Payments. But for context, can you give us a quick 50,000-foot level overview of the company and kind of where you fit into that broader organization? 

Yeah. So Worldpay, now part of Global Payments, is a global payments technology company that helps businesses accept, optimize, and protect payments across the world. So, whether it's in person, online, or on a mobile device, we're there. We're the largest payments acquirer and processing over 73 billion transactions a year by doing end-to-end solutions for our merchants and our partners. We provide all the infrastructure behind transactions and build additional product and financial technology that helps our companies grow revenue and improve their customer experience. So that's Worldpay. How I fit in is I work with our integrated, embedded, and platforms software partners to help them find the right value-added services and products that they need based on the best-in-class experience for their customers to increase market share or customer satisfaction. So, our software partners and our partnership managers all work together to understand what the strategic goals and needs are and how we can help them reach them. I'm focused on the embedded finance platform that we launched last year. That means helping platforms integrate these financial tools and services directly into their platform so they can create a more seamless experience for the customers and unlock new revenue streams. 

Okay. And just for your reference and people that are listening, I have a background in embedded payments and have worked for several companies predecessors to Worldpay when it was Payrix. I did some consulting work with them. So very familiar. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. And I truly am a firm believer in this embedded finance being one of the hot topics in the industry, really, where we've gone from embedding payments into these software platforms to embedding other financial products. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Let's go ahead and dive in. So, when most of these ISVs or software platforms think about embedded finance, where do you think they still underestimate the opportunity? 

I think it could just be a little overwhelming at first. And so, what they know is their bread and butter, what they do on a daily basis and what's made them successful. I think what they're underestimating is how quickly and easily they can enter this market and start generating meaningful year-in revenue. With out-of-the-box solutions like our engine, the heavy lifting, the risk, the compliance, the go-to-market, the support is already handled for them. So that means our software provider can stay focused on what they do best while not getting in value for their merchants and creating deeper stickiness for themselves. Embedded finance really doesn't have to be this multi-year build where you have to hire experts in each part of making it successful. It can become a turnkey revenue accelerator that strengthens the entire platform ecosystem. 

Okay. Well, what changes when a platform moves from offering a single financial product like payments to offering a more complete, you know, financial experience? 

Everything changes, right? Top three, I would say uh number one that we focus on or we see the most is just this lift in customer lifetime value. So, platforms are going to see up to a 4x increase in this when they expand from payments only to a full financial suite. And it's not just more revenue, it's these deeper, longer relationships that come along with that. Next, we see a 2-5x more revenue per user. When we see embedded capital, payouts, billing, financial automation stacked together. Each layer is going to increase platform revenue without adding additional complexity for our merchant. And the third, and maybe my favorite, is just that increased platform dependency, the time in their software. So these financial tools tap directly into their daily workflows. Once a merchant, for example, takes capital and then uses integrated billing and payouts and then relies on an automated reconciliation, they're in your system multiple times a day. And that operational dependency is super hard to replicate and even harder to turn away from. So we go from payments that are really just a feature to this complete financial experience that turns into the backbone of their business, and it becomes mission critical. It's not, it's no longer optional or kind of something they can choose. 

And this next question, I really, I really like it because I feel like it's a potential struggle that these companies have is, you know, when they're early in that journey, maybe they've already embedded payments, maybe they haven't. But which embedded finance product do you think kind of tends to create the most immediate value for their customers and why? 

I think there's probably two answers to this, kind of depending on what camp you sit in, whether it's working capital or money management and some banking tools. I sit in the camp of working capital because it's one of the fastest, lowest effort ways to deliver value to your merchants. It can require no cost, no risk, and no operational lift from the platform. Yet it's going to provide access to funding that's automatically qualified based on the information that we already have due to the software's relationship with the merchant today. Capital can be very simple. It's intuitive; people know what to expect. And so, merchants are receiving capital when they need it. They can repay through sales base, through ACH and flexible remittances that naturally match their cash flow cycles, making it very intuitive to the behaviors that they have today. There's no confusion, rigid terms, and no exposure for the platform. And so, it's a really frictionless way to offer financing to your merchant base in a way that feels fair to them, predictable, and really easy to adopt in a place they know and trust. So capital, I think, is the best one to kind of dip our toe in the water if that's what we're thinking of, how to get started with embedded finance and really start, you know, impacting our merchant base. 

Yeah, I want to kind of ask a follow-on question to that because you mentioned something that, you know, I think people who are in this space kind of take for granted and kind of understand. But maybe, you know, maybe the ISVs or the platforms don't think about it as much as the data aspect, right? They already have, like you said, all this data on their customers and especially payments data, which lends, to your point, directly into being able to offer capital. And I think that's something that, I mean, I hope you would agree, makes it such an easier product to kind of integrate. And it just makes a lot of sense to the merchants. 

100%. And from a pre-qualification standpoint, right, we can send anonymized aggregate historical data to different providers in order to generate offers that fit a merchant exactly based on where they are today, whether that's in a high seasonality business or a higher risk or a lower time business, where financing can be a lot harder to capture. If you're a young business, if you have high seasonality, that can be very difficult. But using payment data and data over time that we can send across can be a really great way to provide new merchants with true, true value. 

Okay. Well, what are some of the biggest mistakes platforms make when they're rolling out new embedded finance offerings? 

I think one of the best things about embedded offerings is that they're embedded, right? We're meeting our customers where we are today. The mistake I see made is thinking that's enough, right? It's great. It's better than sending out, you know, a mailer that they're going to get at their doorstep and throw away or an email campaign, but success still is going to depend on a thoughtful go-to-market plan. And so think of it like I'm working with car dealerships, right? You wouldn't run a generic promotion at a random time. You'd sync up campaigns with their sales seasons, so tax refund peaks, model year clearance periods, year end buying cycles, service department surges. There's all kinds of different things you could do that pair with the cash flow of business and providing capital. And when we automate those go-to-market motions, we make it incredibly simple. And so having strong adoption depends on aligning our messaging to the rhythm of the customers that we're serving and doing it in a way where it's not taking so much time, energy, and effort from our team day in and day out, but it's truly an automated process that we can click and go. And being really thoughtful and creative with those systems is kind of what I'm currently passionate about. There's a lot of value to the partners on, hey, why should I offer embedded finance today? I don't think anyone's arguing with me of like this won't provide value, but how can we thoughtfully bring it to market is one of the biggest challenges and having embedded marketing and thoughtful marketing to go along with it, kind of beginning with the end in mind is what we're looking to do. 

And I would assume from your perspective that can be challenging because it's going to be different for every vertical, right? I mean, mentioned car dealerships, but there are you know 50 other verticals out there or more, right? So, I would think that becomes challenging. So, what are your thoughts on that? 

That's why it's great to have awesome partners. And so kind of going back to the very beginning, we partner with external providers; we get our own data as well. And so, as the end user, as the software provider, they're not having to think, hey, how are my merchants going to use this? They're not experts in working capital, but we have external providers that have worked across every vertical for several years, and we can kind of take the marketing data that they've gotten from that. And then we have our own case studies where we've seen what's been successful as well. And so, when you're not trying to take this journey completely alone and reinvent the wheel, when you lean on partners that know how to do it best, that go-to-market really can be a lot more plug-and-play. And in today's day and age where we get to utilize AI, I think there's a lot more coming that's exciting to make the marketing automation based on verticals a lot quicker and easier to do for any size software provider. 

I knew we would not get through the conversation without AI coming up. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what conversation or what it's about. AI always comes up, which is a great thing. Well, let's pivot a little bit and talk about friction, customer loyalty, and lifetime value. I mean, all great topics that ISVs and platforms, you know, want to hear about and need to hear about. So, how does embedding financial tools directly into the software experience help reduce friction for the end users? 

Yeah, this is one of the parts I think I'm most passionate about. My husband ran a small business for seven years. And then working in the Treasury Department, I worked with a lot of small businesses. And friction is kind of just like a part of their day-to-day, right? It's really hard to be a small business. It's hard to know where to go for everything. And I think just the decision fatigue that they face on a day-to-day basis can be quite overwhelming where they're really just looking for a Swiss Army knife to run their business on. So, embedding financial tools directly into their platform to me is like flying on a nonstop flight versus one with multiple connections. So, we have one boarding pass, we have one login, one plane, it's one platform, there's no risk of missing our connections or things that can go wrong. Everything is handled by one airline that you trust. And so that's that white-labeled support with it. The result is our traveler, merchant, gets where they need to go faster, smoother, and with less stress. And for the end user, it's everything to have that direct flight while still benefiting the software platform as well. And so, I think that's to me, when we care about our merchants and making their life easier, that's where embedded finance gets even more compelling because it becomes this ecosystem that you know creates more ease within their day-to-day. 

When we think about friction, so you sort of mentioned friction from the perspective of having it all in one place. But do you also think there's friction within the tools themselves? Like how these things are integrated in the decisions, how easy they are. I guess more like a UX kind of thing. So, any kind of thoughts on you know the way software companies should be embedding things to make it easy for the merchant once they're in the software to take advantage of these offers? 

Yeah. So, we've gone with a widget approach where all of our different embedded finance offerings are going to live in this widget with the same UX experience. It's going to have different white-labeled support and it's all within one spot that they're able to manage. This version, I think, almost solves it on the partner side, potentially more of if I'm a partner and I'm trying to offer all these different embedded finance offerings, I'm managing all these different connection points, and communication points, and integrations, and updates. And that's going to get really messy really fast as we start to add different financial tools into our ecosystem. And so having the widget approach that we have here at Worldpay is once they do the integration to the platform, it's a single integration point. As we pile new product in, they're getting an arsenal where they're able to horizontally extend their product set and the revenue streams without having to do any additional tech work, integrations, marketing, go to market. And so I think on the partner side; I see I see that being impacted a lot more. And for the merchants, they just want it all to be in one spot, right? If it's under one login, they don't have to leave the real estate that they're in today. That's kind of I think where the trust is built and where they're going to feel most comfortable. 

For this next one, we've talked about it a little bit, but in your view, what are the sort of mechanisms that actually create loyalty between the merchant and the platform? So, you know, I'm thinking like the workflows, which we kind of talked about, dependency, you know, switching costs, data we talked about, you know, what are those kinds of mechanisms in your mind? 

Yeah, I think workflow integration is number one. When a platform becomes this operating system to the merchant's business, that loyalty is going to skyrocket. So, example of a sticky workflow could be they're doing inventory, which leads to how they're going to do their purchasing, which leads to their billing, and then reconciliation. Or we have patient and client records that go to invoicing, that go to financing, right? There's all these different workflows that we can build. They're going to build a habit and create muscle memory. And once we have staff that's trained on these daily operations and depend on them, merchants are reluctant to disrupt these daily routines, right? That's a very difficult thing to do as a small business. And so those workflow integrations are huge. For embedded finance, I think maybe a bit more relevant is the dependency on this unified tooling. And so that's where embedded finance shines, where that financial layer is fully native to the core workflow. Dependency is going to grow when we have payments, payouts, deposits, reconciliation, all in one spot. Reporting is centralized; it's automated. And these products like capital are going to tie directly into a merchant's behavior. And so, when we remove that platform, we break everything else. You know, the merchant's not losing a tool; they're losing their system. And that's why we see the embedded part being so important for the retention. 

Yeah, and the next question is really about retention. But for years and years, when we were talking about embedding payments, it was really a lot of times it was a revenue discussion, right? That that these software companies could drive revenue. But why are products like business banking, working capital, even debit cards, why are they becoming so important to customer retention, not just the revenue side? 

Yeah, I think if I were a software provider, something I'd be thinking about really critically right now is it going to become more difficult in the future to gain net new merchants? Because embedded finance is this wave that's coming, whether you like it or not, whether you want to get on or not, it's coming. And as these providers or as your competition in your vertical starts to roll out products like capital, like banking that are the core pillars of a business, it's going to be a lot harder to offer a shiny new price or something small on the payment side to recruit a business to switch over. And so, I think from a retention perspective, it's almost like how can we be proactive? Because it's going to, we're going to see less switching in this vertical as it becomes more integral to a business on how they're running their day-to-day operations. Again, they're not losing a tool; they're losing a system. And so, banking is our stickiest product in market today. If you think most people have probably only banked one or two places in their lives, a lot of times it's the first one they ever went to, which is crazy. But there's not a lot of switching happening in that vertical. So, one, if we're going to roll it out back to go to market, we have to be thoughtful of how we're going to win here. How can we partner with existing banking relationships? How can we get faster funding, make card issuance easier, right? It's a harder vertical to win in. But once we've won in it, it is so sticky and it's very, very difficult to lose merchants. You know, if someone can offer a discounted pricing or something easy for the first couple of years, you're going to see that that trend decrease and really get the value back of the effort you put into the go-to-market on the on the banking side or the capital side. 

Okay. Well, how should platforms think about the impact of embedded finance on lifetime value and overall account growth? So that's part one and second part. What metrics should they be tracking? 

I think to just call out what platforms can see if they're going to add embedded finance would be the merchants are going to adopt more revenue-producing products, right? They're going to use the platform more frequently, their operations become dependent on it, their churn drops, the revenue rises, and cash flow itself runs through the platform. And so, I don't even, I don't even think we've fully been able to capitalize on what we're going to be able to do with all that data. When we see a full business functioning from payments to reconciliation to cash flow to capital to how they're doing their banking, all of that knowledge is going to empower us to really support our businesses in a new and awesome way. And the metrics are something that if we track it thoughtfully, it's not just kind of the surface level, what kind of rev-share can I get through these products? And you mentioned it before, but when I'm walking into a conversation, revenue is second to retention. If there's going to be revenue, that's going to be exciting, but retention is really the key. And that's where these metrics shine. Like the lifetime value uplift, right? We're obviously going to track that revenue per merchant, multi-product adoption, how many products are they adopting? What's that sweet spot potentially? Too much, too little, the different engagement and dependencies, so where their mouse is spending time, where they're easily finding products, how long they're spending there, and then the different cash flow, you know, penetration. So, how much of this merchant's money is actually running through your platform? What are we not capturing? What are we capturing? And then the retention rate in our RDR, how we're seeing that across the platform change with embedded finance. And then I think where you have to focus once you have this suite is the contribution margin. And so which products are really driving profitability and stickiness within your platform and understanding that so we can, you know, spend quality time on our quality products and making sure we're driving success where our merchants are using it the most. 

Yeah, that's a lot of information, right? So, I how do you feel like do most software companies like, do they do the surface level and it's harder to get them to that deep, or do they have resources in-house that can look at those metrics? Because you said a lot there that really can drive a business. And it's not just, hey, what's my revenue, what's my retention, what's my lifetime value? It's really digging into contribution margin, which set of customers or cohorts you know are driving more contribution than I mean, there's a lot of detail there. So, kind of what do you see today? Like what are companies actually doing today? 

I would say that they're probably tracking 50% of those. So, we're looking at lifetime value, we're looking at revenue per merchant, we're looking at retention, and we're looking at engagement dependencies sometimes, right? Kind of depending on our sophistication. The multi-product adoption, the contribution margin, and the cash flow penetration are going to be new metrics, right? That's probably not stuff that we've been massively focused on before. Maybe payments to not payments, right, is kind of something they've tracked before. But on a larger scale, that's not something they're looking at. But again, it's why it's so great to work with external providers that do this as their bread and butter because when we're launching a campaign or when you're in implementation, we can set different goals and show you what best practices look like and what actions lead to increases on these different metrics. And so, it's not always that someone's going to track it for you, you have to care the most about growing these metrics within your business, but we can show you what we've seen, what success looks like, and draw more attention to how to track them. But really, it's also going to come back to the platform's strategic goals, what they want to track, right? They may not care about the things that we think they should care about. And so, you know, making sure we're listening to, hey, I the only thing I care about, the only thing I want to drive is retention. Maybe we narrow in on that and just focus on that and make that as impactful as possible. We're not so worried about cash flow penetration. And so, each story is going to be a little bit different depending on what their core focuses as a business are. 

Okay. Well, looking ahead, how do you see embedded finance changing the competitive landscape for these software platforms over the next couple of years? 

Yeah, I think we spoke on it before, but it's going to reshape the competitive landscape because platforms that adopt it are becoming, I hate this analogy sometimes, but the smartphones of their category, right? And the ones that aren't are kind of stuck on our flip phones. And so it's not that if you haven't started, you're already behind, but it's going to get harder and harder to win this new business as all the platforms around you get stickier and stickier, offering all this value to their merchants and they get better if they go to market, they get better at the strategies and they're able to grow in in staff and revenue by the revenue and retention they're gaining from these products. And so, you know, really being focused on what you do is the core part of a lot of these businesses. And I think the hesitation is like; this is what we do. If we provide this vertical software to nonprofits, that's what we're amazing at. That's what we want to focus on, that's why they're our customers. I don't think you have to let that go in order to offer embedded finance. And that's the biggest mindset shift that I look to see is just because we want to be great and amazing and focus on what we do best doesn't necessarily mean that we can't offer embedded finance and partner with really good experts that can roll this out in a thoughtful way and still impact our merchant base without degrading what we've earned their business for doing. 

Okay. Well, Whitney, one final question. What is the one key takeaway that you hope the audience remembers from this conversation when they think about embedded finance as a driver of retention and growth? 

I just want them to go back to the nonstop flight. And so, for your merchants, they are getting that nonstop flight. One check-in, no layovers, no lost luggage. The merchants are getting there faster, platform earns more miles, right? When you're booking flights, you're not going to try to have all these different connections or stopping points. You're going to try to get there as fast and as easy as possible. And that's what embedded finance is going to do for your merchants. It's going to create this easy experience. They have less stress, they have more trust, they have more stickiness and loyalty to you. And everyone really wins in this ecosystem where we have, you know, an easy trip and better economics. 

Okay. Well, Whitney, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So, I know your time is very valuable and I really appreciate it. So, thank you so much for being here today. 

Yeah, thank you so much, Greg. I had a great time. 

And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.