Scaling Embedded Finance: How Banks Can Efficiently Serve Multiple Partners and Industries

Embedded finance is rapidly reshaping the financial services landscape, enabling banks to deliver financial products and services directly within the digital journeys of non-financial partners. From e-commerce platforms offering buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) at checkout to ERP systems integrating working capital solutions, embedded finance is no longer a future trend—it's a present-day imperative for banks seeking growth, relevance, and new revenue streams.

Yet, while the opportunity is vast, the path from pilot projects to enterprise-scale embedded finance is fraught with operational, technical, and strategic challenges. Banks must move beyond isolated partnerships and bespoke integrations to build scalable, modular, and partner-centric platforms that can efficiently serve multiple partners across diverse industries. This page explores the critical building blocks for scaling embedded finance, drawing on Publicis Sapient’s deep experience in digital business transformation and ecosystem integration.

The Embedded Finance Opportunity—and the Scaling Challenge

The market for embedded finance is expanding at a remarkable pace, with global revenues projected to reach $160 billion by 2025. Early adoption has been led by fintechs and digital-native challengers, particularly in payments and BNPL. However, banks are increasingly recognizing the strategic imperative to participate—whether as infrastructure providers, product manufacturers, or regulated balance sheet owners.

The core value proposition of embedded finance is clear: bring banking to where customers already are, delivering seamless, context-rich experiences that drive engagement and unlock new monetization opportunities. For banks, this means:

Accessing new customer segments through partners’ distribution channels
Generating additional fee and interest income
Deepening relationships with both partners and end customers

But the central challenge remains: how can banks efficiently scale their embedded finance propositions to serve multiple partners—each with unique commercial goals, technology stacks, and customer journeys—without incurring unsustainable costs or complexity?

The Modular Capability Stack: Foundation for Scale

At the heart of scalable embedded finance is a modular capability stack that decouples core banking functions from partner-facing experiences. This stack typically includes:

Customer Proximity Layer (Partner/Distributor): The partner owns the customer relationship and digital journey, embedding financial services to enhance their core offering.
API Layer: Robust, multi-tenant APIs enable secure, compliant, and rapid integration of banking services into partner platforms. This layer is critical for efficient onboarding and ongoing servicing of multiple partners.
Financial Product Manufacturing: Banks design and manage the financial products (e.g., loans, payments, insurance) that are embedded into partner journeys.
Banking Infrastructure: Underlying processes, risk management, and operational capabilities that support product delivery at scale.
Regulated Entity/Balance Sheet: The bank (or a third party) provides the regulatory compliance and capital backing for the embedded products.

A modular, API-driven architecture allows banks to efficiently customize offerings for different partners without rebuilding core systems for each integration. It also supports rapid scaling, as new partners can be onboarded with minimal incremental effort.

Partner Acquisition and Proposition Co-Creation

Scaling embedded finance is not just a technology challenge—it’s a commercial and operational one. Banks must develop clear strategies for:

Partner Acquisition: Building a pipeline of target partners across industries, with differentiated value propositions tailored to each segment (e.g., retail, B2B marketplaces, ERP providers).
Proposition Co-Creation: Collaborating closely with partners to design blended offerings that combine financial and non-financial services, aligned to the partner’s business goals and customer needs.
Partner Servicing: Establishing dedicated teams and processes to support partners throughout the lifecycle, from onboarding to ongoing optimization and support.

Banks that succeed in embedded finance typically adopt a “test-and-learn” approach, launching minimum viable products (MVPs) with initial partners, gathering feedback, and iterating rapidly. This agile, startup-like mindset is essential for keeping pace with the expectations of digital-native partners.

Delivery Models for Enterprise-Scale Embedded Finance

To move from pilot to scale, banks must rethink their delivery models:

Digital-First Organization: Embedded finance is inherently digital. Banks must break down silos, embrace cross-functional DevOps teams, and adopt agile product development practices.
Ecosystem Integration: Success depends on strong relationships with fintechs, API providers, and technology partners. Banks should view these players as strategic collaborators, not just vendors.
Flexible, Composable Architecture: Cloud-native, event-driven, and composable platforms enable banks to swap or add new fintech solutions as needed, supporting a diverse and evolving partner ecosystem.
Data at the Core: Real-time data integration and analytics are essential for insight-driven product development, risk management, and partner servicing.

Overcoming Common Barriers to Scale

Banks face several recurring challenges as they scale embedded finance:

Legacy Technology: Siloed, monolithic systems hinder integration and agility. Modernization—often via cloud migration and API enablement—is a prerequisite for scale.
Operational Agility: Traditional product-centric operating models are too slow. Banks must adopt outcome-based funding, agile governance, and continuous delivery.
Partner-Centric Mindset: Success requires deep understanding of partner needs and the ability to efficiently customize offerings—what Publicis Sapient calls “efficient customization.”
Regulatory Compliance: As the number of partners and use cases grows, so does the complexity of compliance. Automated controls, policy-based enforcement, and real-time monitoring are essential.

Real-World Success: From MVP to Multi-Partner Scale

Publicis Sapient has helped leading banks build and scale embedded finance platforms, including:

Launching a BaaS-first SME bank in just nine months, orchestrating 22 fintech partners and targeting 350,000 SMEs with fully automated processes and a cloud-native, API-driven platform.
Supporting a strategic joint venture to create a platform-as-a-service fintech, delivering both banking and non-banking services to millions of customers across Southeast Asia.

These examples demonstrate that with the right strategy, architecture, and operating model, banks can move from isolated pilots to enterprise-scale embedded finance—serving multiple partners and industries efficiently and profitably.

The Publicis Sapient Advantage

Scaling embedded finance is a journey that demands expertise in digital transformation, ecosystem integration, and agile delivery. Publicis Sapient partners with banks to:

Define strategic “north stars” and target partner/customer segments
Design and build modular, scalable platforms
Orchestrate fintech ecosystems and manage partner pipelines
Accelerate time-to-market with agile, cross-functional teams
Enable continuous iteration and efficient customization for diverse partners

Banks that act now—investing in the right capabilities and delivery models—will be best positioned to capture the full potential of embedded finance, driving growth, innovation, and customer relevance in a rapidly evolving digital economy.

Ready to scale your embedded finance proposition? Connect with Publicis Sapient to unlock the next phase of growth and efficiency in digital financial services.