Written by Karine Martinez, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Wallester
Corporate finance teams spend their days inside ERP and accounting platforms, because that is where so many workflows live. There are budgets, approvals, reconciliation, reporting. But at some point money actually needs to move, and that’s when many leave. Usually, they log into a bank portal, initiate a payment, wait for it to clear, then come back and match it manually against the records they have. Put plainly, the banking layer sits outside the platform. The gap between the two is where the manual work accumulates.
For many finance teams, this is the standard operating model. It persists because the traditional bank relationship was not designed to sit inside someone else’s product in the first place. It has always been seen mainly as a destination.
What the Platform Is Leaving on the Table
For ERP providers and finance platforms, that gap represents something very specific. Here’s a workflow that your users complete elsewhere, in a tool you do not control. Also, it generates data that does not flow back into your system cleanly. In other words, every payment initiated outside your platform is a moment when the user’s relationship with their bank is stronger than their relationship with you.
Last-year research from Nine Wavemakes the demand explicit. Eighty-eight percent of financial professionals consider direct bank connectivity very or extremely beneficial. Even more telling, eighty-five percent say they would switch banks to get direct accounting or ERP connectivity. Teams with direct connections save an average of 5.6 hours per week. Users are not waiting for someone to invent this, because the option already exists. What they’re waiting for is for the existing platforms to offer it.
The Retention and Revenue Argument
Embedding payments, branded card issuance, and account functionality into a platform changes the retention dynamic in a way that most feature investments cannot match. A user who runs their spend management, cards, and reconciliation through your platform is probably not evaluating competitors on a feature checklist.
There is also a direct commercial argument. Card transactions generate interchange revenue, meaning a percentage of every payment that flows back to the card issuer. For platforms processing meaningful transaction volume across their user base, this compounds into a recurring revenue line that grows with usage.
The Build Question
The practical objection tends to be the same: the regulatory overhead, technical complexity, and compliance requirements are not something platforms are set up to manage. That’s a reasonable position. Or, more precisely, it was before embedded finance solutions changed the calculation.
Now platforms can offer card issuing, accounts, and payment functionality under their own product, and they can do so without building or owning the underlying rails. The division of responsibilities is simple. The infrastructure provider handles the regulatory, infrastructural, and technical layer. The platform owns the experience, the user relationship, and the commercial upside.
It’s important to separate those two questions clearly. The product decision – to embed financial functionality – is driven by the business case. The infrastructure question is a matter of finding the right partner.
Why Move Quickly
Demand from finance teams has been consistent for long enough that we can’t really label it a forward-looking trend anymore. It is a current need, and it is unmet. The platforms that close the gap now build a layer of stickiness that compounds. The ones that wait will find their users accessing it elsewhere. Obviously, when that is the case, the relationship becomes easier to replace in the process.
At Wallester, this is precisely the kind of partnership we are built for. Our White Label infrastructure gives platforms the card issuing, account functionality, and payment rails to make this happen without the regulatory overhead or the multi-year build. The experience stays theirs. The hard part is already done.
