It seems like every conference this year has an embedded finance panel on the schedule. It also seems like many of them dance around the actual questions. In Munich, at PayTech Forum on 7 July, that wasn’t the case. The question was laid down straightforwardly: is embedded finance an established, operational force in financial services, or should we still treat it as mostly a pitch deck?
Four People, Four Corners of the Same Market
Karine Martinez, Wallester’s Head of Strategic Partnerships, joined three other experts who could each answer that same question from a different point in the embedded finance stack.
Leonard Strigelcame from YouLend, which finances small businesses through the platforms they already sell on, instead of through a bank. Felix Kristl came from eBay, where he runs Seller Capital, the actual product a seller sees when they log in and get offered a pre-approved loan. Timo Zwez came from Banking Circle, the licensed bank that handles the cross-border payments and liquidity underneath a lot of this activity, including some of YouLend’s own infrastructure. Zwez also moderated.
What Each of Them Does
Between them, the four panellists cover a good cross-section of where embedded finance actually shows up, and three of them turn out to be more connected than a shared stage might suggest. YouLend and eBay built a credit product together: eBay owns the merchant relationship and gives YouLend access to sellers’ trading history, and YouLend turns that data into pre-approved, same-day funding decisions. Banking Circle provides regulated infrastructure that other institutions build on, including some of YouLend’s operations. Wallester is also a Banking Circle partner.
As Martinez put it: “One thing became clear very quickly: embedded finance is no longer about proving the concept. The discussion wasn’t about whether it works, but about what it takes to make it work reliably at scale.”
Infrastructure Is Becoming the Competitive Advantage
“Coming from different parts of the ecosystem, we naturally emphasised different priorities,” Martinez said. “eBay focused on creating a seamless seller experience, YouLend on using platform data to make lending faster and more relevant, while my perspective from Wallester was that none of those experiences are possible without resilient infrastructure sitting underneath.”
That, she said, is exactly what makes infrastructure easy to overlook: “As financial services become more embedded, the technology supporting them becomes less visible to users, but more important than ever. Anybody can build an app, very few can manage an infrastructure. Customers don’t see the issuing platform, payment rails, or compliance engine. They simply expect everything to work when needed.”
Her sharpest point was that this invisibility raises the stakes rather than lowering them: “Reliability, resilience and regulatory robustness are no longer operational concerns; they’re becoming competitive differentiators. The smoother the customer journey, the stronger the infrastructure must be. Making it invisible is creating more work for all providers.”
Partnerships Succeed When Every Player Focuses on What They Do Best
The eBay and YouLend product gave the panel a live example to point to instead of a hypothetical one. “The platform understands its merchants and owns the customer relationship,” Martinez said. “The lending specialist brings underwriting expertise. Infrastructure providers enable secure, scalable delivery. Embedded finance isn’t about one company doing everything. It’s about specialist capabilities working together so that the customer experiences a single, frictionless journey.”
Nobody Really Knows What Embedded Finance 3.0 Looks Like
The closing discussion turned to AI, and here the panel was more united in its uncertainty than its confidence. “Everyone agreed that AI will accelerate change, whether in underwriting, fraud prevention, customer service, or spend management,” Martinez said. “What nobody was prepared to claim was that we know exactly where the industry will be in five years. If anything, AI makes long-term predictions harder, not easier.”
The one thing the room did seem to agree on, she said, was narrower but more durable: “customer expectations will continue to rise, making adaptable, resilient infrastructure even more important. Whatever products emerge next, they’ll need foundations capable of evolving just as quickly as the technology itself.”
The Verdict
Forty minutes wasn’t a debate about whether embedded finance works anymore. It was four people, three of them already tied together through partnerships or shared infrastructure, comparing notes on how much further it has to scale. If there was a verdict in the room, it was Martinez’s own: the real competition has moved underneath the product, into the infrastructure nobody except the businesses running on it will ever actually see.
