Embedded Finance as Customer Intelligence
Roy Ng, EVP, Chief Business Officer at FIS, on the future of BaaS
For large enterprises, embedded finance is less a profit center than a live customer behavior sensor. A card, wallet, or lending product shows what customers buy, when they pay, how often they return, and where money gets stuck in the workflow. That is why bigger brands care more about owning the financial touchpoint than squeezing out a few extra basis points of interchange. The payment activity makes the rest of the customer record much more complete.
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Startups often use embedded finance to create meaningful revenue. Large enterprises usually do not. In Bond's view, interchange and fees are small next to the core business, so the bigger prize is a fuller picture of customer behavior across software usage and money movement.
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This is especially powerful in vertical SaaS. A radiology software vendor, for example, can see not just scheduling and patient workflow, but also when payments happen and where financing is needed. That can feed better underwriting, fraud controls, and product design.
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The platform model matters because the data is fragmented otherwise. Roy Ng argues enterprises do not just need an issuer processor. They need one system that combines card data with KYC, fraud, ledger, and bank reporting, which is why all in one BaaS platforms pitch a system of record rather than a single API.
This pushes embedded finance toward a broader enterprise software sale. The winning providers will be the ones that turn payments, accounts, and lending into customer intelligence and workflow automation, not just interchange revenue. As more non financial software companies adopt these tools, data depth will become the main reason they add financial products at all.