For most SaaS platforms and marketplaces, payments are still treated as a cost. There are several reasons for this. Mainly, processing fees go out. But reconciliation also takes time, and finance teams deal with the admin in the background.
Too often, the conversation around embedded finance focuses on user experience: how to make payments feel like part of the platform instead of sending users somewhere else. Of course, that still matters. Yet there is another side to it: revenue.
What happens when a platform issues its own branded cards instead of sending transactions through a third party is that the economics start to change. In short, interchange becomes income. Also, the card becomes part of the user’s daily workflow, and the platform gets access to spending behaviour and patterns it could not see before.
On May 6th, we covered this topic in our webinar, Beyond Banking: How Tech Platforms Are Scaling Revenue with Embedded Cards.
The panel included:
- Lars Markull, Founder, Embedded Finance Review
- Alex Snurnitsyn, Co-founder & CEO, Beneflo
- Mihails Hruscovs, Business Development Manager, Wallester (Host)
- Angelina Prokopenko, Marketing Project Management Team Lead, Wallester (Moderator)
If you missed the live session, here is what made it worth watching.
The Revenue Flip in Practice
“Companies can reach a point very quickly where they make more money from interchange than from what they charge customers directly,” said Lars Markull, Founder of Embedded Finance Review.
The business case is no longer just theoretical. Clearly, platforms that make this shift are treating cards as more than a useful add-on. They are using them as a revenue line, a retention tool, and a way to understand how customers actually spend.
And today, this can happen much faster than it could a decade ago
“Instead of building the whole infrastructure, why not integrate someone who already has everything ready, tested, and working?” said Mihails Hruscovs, Business Development Manager at Wallester.
In other words, that is where the model becomes practical. Platforms bring the use case, audience, and customer experience. Wallester provides the card-issuing infrastructure behind it.
Beneflo: The Live Example
The webinar’s working case study was Beneflo’s launch on Wallester White-Label: a borderless employee benefits product that went live in weeks and was recently selected for the Visa Innovation Program Europe.
“When you are starting with a partner, fixed cost becomes variable cost,” said Alex Snurnitsyn, Co-founder and CEO of Beneflo. “Instead of carrying the full cost of building the organisation and infrastructure yourself, you work with a cost per card, or a similar model. That makes it much easier to build your unit economics, especially at the initial stage.”
For more on how Beneflo built it, see the full case study.
Watch the Recording
The full session is embedded below. If your platform is paying processors today and could be earning interchange tomorrow, you do not want to miss this one.
