You’ve set up an embedded finance project. So…now what?

You’ve done it. You’ve launched your embedded solution and are now offering financial services to your customers. You can sit down and put your feet up. You’re done, right? 

Perhaps. We’ve never been shy to talk about the transformative power of embedded finance. It may be that once you’ve built and launched your new embedded finance project, your business has everything it needs for unbridled success. A home run. 

However, research suggests that if you really want to get the most out of embedded finance, your journey doesn’t stop just because v1.0 of the product has been delivered. In our most recent whitepaper, we spoke to the leaders of seven different businesses that have actually worked on integrating an embedded finance solution. They revealed what they found should come next.

We’ve shared their insights below, along with some of our own thoughts: 

Test, test and test again 

Embedded financial infrastructure isn’t designed to create technical difficulties for your business, but nothing ever is. Sometimes unforeseen technical challenges occur, and the best thing you can do is get out in front of them. You’ve built brand new functionality into your product. Testing new features, user responses and improvements are paramount to ensuring that it meets your expectations. 

“Before we start proper integration work, we run our API calls in a sandbox environment, to see if there are any surprises. If you try to build a payment solution for multiple markets you’re working with multiple payments rails, and the earlier you uncover them the better” - Lucas Gaffron, Lano.

Up the experience

One of the key benefits of embedded finance is it allows you to offer new embedded services while retaining full control of the customer experience. Once you have partnered with a provider and launched an embedded financial service, you can mould the experience in a way which most suits your business and customer base. 

“Our strategy is to work with a partner to see if their offer resonates with users. If it does, we try to up that experience by bringing it in-house. We want to own it end to end to ensure customers are always treated right” - Anirudh Narla, Hopper.

Not satisfied? Say so

If your embedded finance project is not behaving as expected and you don’t feel that the provider is delivering on what they claimed, you should let them know. Things can be tweaked and changed to improve efficiency - if the dropout rate is much higher than you think it should be, it probably is. 

“We have noticed that companies were dropping out of the funnel at certain steps. We gave the feedback to the PSP, who after analysing the data adjusted their process, made some parts more explanatory, and changed the order of the data collection, significantly improving the conversion rate” - Lucas Gaffron, Lano. 

Keep building!

How your customers are using the financial services you’re providing may give you inspiration for building out more products. This information may come through analysis of use or from a more direct communication with your client base. Ultimately, it’s better to spend a little more time building out an offering that your customers really can’t live without, then being satisfied with something that is just ‘good enough’.

Iterating on your embedded finance project isn’t a reflection of poor performance. Just like everything else in business, it is fine to have a MVP and then work from there.

Embedded finance’s key strength is that it gives you opportunities. To ignore it after it has launched would be like buying a hotel and then not making a single change to the decor, service or facilities. Sure, it works well, customers are enjoying it. But is it really the best it can be? Does it fully reflect your starting vision? And is it going to evolve to meet changing customer demands?

The day you launch embedded finance isn’t your finish line, It’s day one. The exciting part is that where you go from there is completely up to you.