The market moment is here
Juniper Research put a number on it in 2024: embedded finance revenue will grow 148%, from $92 billion to $228 billion by 2028, driven by increasing market maturity and accelerating adoption in B2B contexts specifically. This isn’t a retail consumer story anymore. It’s an enterprise one — and banks are positioned to be the primary beneficiaries, if they can solve the connectivity problem that’s been keeping them on the sideline.
Embedded finance is a structural shift in how financial services reach end customers. Financial products are increasingly delivered inside the platforms and workflows businesses already use — not through separate bank portals that customers have to seek out. The question for banks is no longer whether embedded finance matters. It’s whether banks will be the ones delivering it, or whether that position gets taken by technology platforms and fintechs who are already moving.
What embedded finance actually means for a bank
Embedded finance is the delivery of a custom, timely financial product at the point of need — inside the non-financial platform where the customer already operates. Banking-as-a-service is the model that makes it possible: extending a bank’s capabilities through an enterprise’s ERP or accounting environment, rather than requiring the customer to leave that environment to access banking services.
For banks, this is a meaningful shift in orientation. Instead of being a destination that corporate customers visit to access financial services, the bank becomes infrastructure that those customers operate inside. The services don’t change. The delivery does. And the delivery is where the competitive advantage lives.
Where the revenue opportunity is being missed
Enterprise customers already use their bank’s services. But in most cases, they access them through fragmented, manual processes that require separate logins, separate workflows, and separate integrations for every service category. Trade finance here, letters of credit there, FX managed separately, insurance sourced from an entirely different provider.
Banks have the products. What they lack is the infrastructure to surface those products in context — inside the ERP environment where the enterprise customer is already managing their financial operations. The result is that banks are competing only on the services a customer actively seeks out, rather than capturing the full wallet of what the customer needs.
Banks have the products. What they lack is the infrastructure to surface those products in context.
Every service a customer accesses outside the bank’s ecosystem — from a fintech, a specialist provider, or a competing institution — is revenue the bank could have captured. The embedded finance opportunity is, in large part, a recapture opportunity.
The connectivity advantage
The shift becomes economically viable when a bank integrates once with an intelligent connectivity layer, gaining the ability to serve multiple enterprise customers across a full suite of services without duplicating integration costs per customer or per ERP platform.
The outcomes are direct and measurable. Zero cost of integration and zero cost of ongoing maintenance, because the connectivity layer handles that centrally. A single unified interface across all the ERP platforms a bank’s enterprise customers use — NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, MS Dynamics, and the SMB accounting packages below them. The ability to onboard a new enterprise customer in minutes rather than months. High visibility and analytics across all integrations from one dashboard. And the ability to customize and launch new digital products without risking existing integrations.
That last point matters more than it might seem. In the current 1:1 model, many banks cannot launch new digital products without a significant IT project. The connectivity layer removes that constraint, making the bank’s product suite genuinely extensible for the first time.
The services the connectivity layer makes possible
The suite of services that become accessible through an intelligent connectivity layer maps directly to what enterprise customers need across their financial supply chain. On the payment side: ACH, check processing, push payments, tokenized transactions, and FX. On the financing side: PO financing, trade financing, letters of credit, bill discounting, early pay programs, working capital tools, and loans. And on the risk side: insurance and dynamic risk covers that can be surfaced contextually based on transaction data flowing through the ERP.
None of these are new products. They are existing bank capabilities that, through an embedded connectivity model, become accessible inside the customer’s operating environment — rather than requiring the customer to seek them out separately. The bank doesn’t need to build new services. It needs to connect the ones it already has.
The window for banks is now
The embedded finance opportunity belongs to whoever controls the connection. Technology platforms and fintechs understand this — they are already building the embedded finance layer from the non-financial side, adding financial services to products that customers already rely on. Banks have the regulatory standing, the balance sheet, and the institutional relationships to own this space. But owning it requires owning the infrastructure that connects their services to their customers’ daily operations.
Banks that build or adopt the connectivity layer now capture the relationship. Banks that wait will find themselves as the back-end provider — supplying the financial product while a technology platform owns the customer experience and, increasingly, the customer relationship itself.
The embedded finance opportunity is not a future state. It is being captured right now, by whoever moves first to build the infrastructure layer.