Embedded Finance Review

Vertical SaaS sits at the centre of embedded finance, and companies like Phorest are the ones shaping it. Phorest has built software for 20 years and has been in payments for five of those years. In this episode, I speak with Patrick O’Donnell, Global Commercial Director, Payments at Phorest, the Irish software company that hair and beauty salons, med spas, and aesthetics clinics run on. Patrick explains why payments only arrived 15 years into Phorest’s life and came out of the US business rather than a roadmap, how the pay pillar group pulls product, engineering, ops, marketing and finance into one room, and why the capital product launched without customers asking for it. In this episode we cover: Why around 70 per cent of payment activity is card present, and what that means for terminals What salon owners use embedded capital for, from the January slowdown to new machinery and new branches How buy now, pay later is rolling out, and why customers have to switch it on themselves Why embedded payroll starts in the US and Canada, and what booking and employee data lets Phorest do with it What share of revenue financial services could reach, and where it sits against the software business What changes when you move from Citibank and Mastercard into a non-regulated software company Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-o-donnell-24354752/ About Embedded Finance Review: Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. I also offer Office Hours, free intro calls for companies navigating embedded finance, and host regular in-person events across Europe. Find all details at embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/ (00:00) Intro (03:14) When SaaS Should Add Payments(05:24) Why Embedded Payments Took Off(07:14) What Phorest Does(08:56) Full Stack Features And Markets(11:42) How Phorest Payments Work(14:49) Building The Fintech Team(19:24) Choosing New Finance Products(24:25) Revenue Versus Customer Value(30:54) Advice And Wrap Up

Most fintech companies in Europe run on an e-money licence, not a bank licence. With both licences, the provider can offer basic banking features. But the "how" differs and can matter for some brands. In this episode, I speak with Phoebe Wallis, Chief Revenue Officer at Griffin, a UK bank that other companies build financial products on. Phoebe explains why all e-money institutions still have a bank underneath them that the brand never sees, why Griffin went through the bank licence process itself, and why the flow of funds document decides most of her yes or no calls. In this episode we cover: What you give up when an e-money institution sits between you and the bank Why many fintechs start with an EMI and move to a bank once they want control over pricing and risk appetite Why Griffin chose the slower route of applying for its own bank licence Why a non-financial brand needs internal conviction and a business case before it talks to a bank The three types of no, and why the flow of funds document is the biggest yes or no What to check before approaching a bank, from risk appetite to public pricing and sandbox Connect with Phoebe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phoebe-wallis-6758a0a4/ About Embedded Finance Review: Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. I also offer Office Hours, free intro calls for companies navigating embedded finance, and host regular in-person events across Europe. Find all details at embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/

Three-quarters of allO's revenue comes from payments, lending and insurance. None of it was planned. Cancan Liu co-founded the Munich-based restaurant platform in 2021 as a QR code ordering tool. Every financial product since started with a restaurant owner asking for something. allO is now live in around one thousand restaurants across Germany, with Austria next. In this episode we cover: The four phases of allO, from scan to order and pay to digital employees Why integrating with existing point of sale systems was a dead end in Germany The cuisine go-to-market, with dedicated Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese and German teams How one night of manual reconciliation turned allO into a payments company Working with finmid and Stripe on lending, and what restaurants get from their bank instead What happens to a software business when financial services become three quarters of revenue Connect with Cancan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liucancan/ About Embedded Finance Review: Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. I also offer Office Hours, free intro calls for companies navigating embedded finance, and host regular in-person events across Europe. Find all details at embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/

Aurimas Bakas is a serial fintech entrepreneur, and each of his companies grew out of the last. Running a payments business, he kept hearing from customers that they didn't want the payment service; they wanted the core banking underneath it. That became Paysolut, which he co-founded and sold to SumUp in 2021. Building core banking for licensed financial institutions across Europe then sparked the next idea. As a critical vendor, he had to prove his own security and compliance to every customer, long before DORA existed. He could see where the regulation was heading. That became Copla. In this episode, I speak with Aurimas, CEO and co-founder of Copla, a compliance platform built specifically for the financial industry. Copla helps licensed financial institutions manage DORA end-to-end, and helps their vendors handle the ISO 27001 and other frameworks their customers demand. The platform acts as a register layer for vendors, assets, risks, and incidents, with AI agents doing the heavy lifting on reporting, documentation, and training. Copla already serves over one hundred regulated companies across Europe and raised a six-million-euro round in February. In this episode, we cover: 1. How each of his ventures seeded the next, from payments to core banking to compliance 2. What actually changes for a fintech once the regulator starts auditing 3. How Copla turns registers of vendors, assets, risks, and incidents into the reports regulators ask for 4. The role AI can play in compliance, and where the human still needs to decide 5. Why managing DORA and ISO 27001 on spreadsheets breaks as you scale 6. His advice for founders facing DORA for the first time, and why proportionality matters Connect with Aurimas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurimasbakas/ About Embedded Finance Review: Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. I also offer Office Hours, free intro calls for companies navigating embedded finance, and host regular in-person events across Europe. Find all details at embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/ (00:00) Intro (01:54) ‌Start (02:10) Founder Night Worries (04:08) Why Build Core Banking (06:40) SumUp Partnership And Exit (08:18) Life After Acquisition (09:33) From Core Banking To DORA (11:52) Copla Platform Pitch (13:56) Who Uses It And When (16:59) DORA Outputs And Audits (19:19) AI Versus Compliance Tools (22:50) Selling Compliance To Fintechs (25:15) Funding Vision And Advice

If you are building a financial product inside a non-financial brand, the legal question tends to show up late. The product is designed, the provider is picked, the first customer conversations are underway, and then somebody asks whether you can actually launch it as you have built it. Patrick Liptak is a partner at MYLE, a Berlin law firm whose name stands for Making Your Life Easier. MYLE advises clients across the full spectrum, from early-stage startups through to listed companies, on IT law, data protection and digitalisation projects. Patrick has sat on both sides of this conversation, first building and leading in-house legal teams and now advising from the outside, and his view is that most of the pain comes from when legal gets involved rather than from the law itself. He is also the first lawyer to join me on this podcast, and we recorded this one in person in a studio in Berlin. In this episode we cover: Why companies actually reach out to a lawyer, which is far more often a customer or investor requirement than a founder discovering they need a licence What Patrick wants a product team to send him before the first conversation, and why a recorded demo beats an explanation How to pick the right kind of legal advisor for your stage Why short contracts are harder to write than long ones, and how contract length feeds directly into deal velocity What has happened to document quality since teams started drafting contracts and compliance documentation with AI Where companies waste money on compliance platforms that deliver compliance on paper and little else Why some startups are now inviting their lawyer onto the cap table Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-liptak/ Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast, and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. If you're working on an embedded finance project and want a free intro call to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners, head to embeddedfinancereview.com. This episode was produced by https://orama.tv/ (0:00) Intro(02:18) Meet Patrick Liptak(04:07) Why Companies Call Lawyers(06:51) Legal As Deal Enabler(09:52) Show Demos Not Decks(12:40) From Strategy To Contracts(15:25) Risk Based Decisions(19:02) AI Docs And Fake Compliance(26:58) Trends And Final Advice