Finance
Embedded Finance Explained: How Fintechs Are Transforming Business Banking
Embedded finance is already changing how Dutch BVs bank, borrow, and insure. See what it means in practice, and what is coming next.
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15 mins
Intro
Most explanations of embedded finance start with a definition and work outward from there. That approach tends to produce a phrase that sounds accurate and explains almost nothing about what actually changes for a Dutch BV founder's bank account, credit options, or insurance next year. A better starting point is the handful of things a Dutch entrepreneur already uses every week without ever calling them by this name.
What follows moves from those concrete, familiar examples toward the underlying mechanics: why this shift is happening now rather than a decade ago, what it actually changes across five distinct areas of business finance, how it should shape the way a founder chooses their financial tools, and what is arriving next as the regulatory and technical groundwork keeps expanding.
You Are Already Using It
A supplier sends an invoice with a blue iDEAL payment button, and the payment clears in eight seconds without anyone opening a separate banking app. That is embedded finance. A Dutch entrepreneur receives a working capital offer inside their bookkeeping software on a Tuesday morning, gets a decision in four minutes, and sees the money land by Thursday. That is embedded finance too. A freelancer books professional liability cover while registering a new business on a Dutch incorporation platform, never once visiting an insurer's own website. Same thing again.
The pattern across all three is identical: a financial product shows up exactly where and when someone needs it, inside a workflow they were already in, without forcing them to leave that context and go deal with a separate financial institution. The financial service has quietly become part of the product itself, rather than a separate errand that happens after it.
None of this is a future trend waiting to arrive. It is what Dutch financial infrastructure has been building toward since banks were first required to open up payment account access in 2019, and it is accelerating now that delivering it has become cheaper and the regulatory picture has gotten clearer. The Dutch embedded finance market reached roughly 12.41 billion US dollars in 2025 and is projected to keep growing toward something like 18 billion by 2030, a pace that reflects how quickly financial services are migrating out of standalone bank products and into features living inside the platforms people already use every day.
Why This Could Not Have Happened Ten Years Ago
The question worth asking is not really what embedded finance is, but why it is possible now. Integrating financial services into non-financial products is not itself new; store credit, fuel cards, and retail insurance add-ons have existed for decades in some form. What is new is the infrastructure that lets a fifteen-person software company offer its users a bank account, a credit line, and an insurance product without building any single one of those things itself.
The first piece is the regulatory shift that made bank data genuinely accessible. The EU made it a legal requirement, not a commercial favour granted by individual banks, that payment account data be opened to authorised third parties under proper consent. Any software company working with a licensed payment institution can now pull account data and initiate payments on a user's behalf, and the bank has no real say in whether to grant that access once the legal conditions are met. That regulatory foundation, still running under PSD2 today even as its successor PSD3 and the accompanying PSR work through their final adoption stages in Brussels, is what every embedded payment and embedded banking product in the Netherlands is actually built on top of.
The second piece is Banking-as-a-Service. A handful of European providers, Swan, Railsr, Solaris Bank, and Treezor among them, packaged their banking infrastructure, IBAN issuance, payment rails, card programmes, and the regulatory compliance behind all of it, into services a piece of software can simply call through an API. A software company can request a real, working business bank account for its users within hours, without ever holding a banking licence itself, because the BaaS provider holds that licence and carries the regulatory weight that comes with it. The software company consumes banking capability the same way it already consumes cloud storage or a payments processor.
The third piece is quieter but just as important: API development itself got commoditised. Connecting a payroll tool to a banking API, or an insurance product to a checkout flow, costs a small fraction of what the same integration would have cost around 2015. The technical work stopped being the bottleneck. That single shift is a large part of why the number of embedded finance products available to a Dutch entrepreneur keeps climbing so fast.
Key takeaway: A business bank account sitting inside bookkeeping software is not a feature bolted onto that software. It is the software reaching into banking infrastructure through an API, presenting it under its own interface, and managing the relationship on the user's behalf. The actual banking licence, and the regulated deposit protection that comes with it, sits with the provider working quietly in the background, not with the software brand the user actually sees on screen.
The regulatory layer underneath all of this is worth understanding on its own terms, not just as a footnote here; PSD2 and open banking covers exactly how that access actually works for a Dutch business account.
Five Ways It Is Changing Your Business Banking
Financial services tend to get described from the perspective of whoever is providing them. From where a Dutch BV founder actually sits, what embedded finance changes is a good deal simpler: it determines where you go to get money, credit, and financial protection, and increasingly, the honest answer is nowhere separately at all.
Payments were the starting point, and they remain the most mature part of the picture. iDEAL is itself an embedded payment product, a bank payment mechanism woven directly into e-commerce checkouts, invoicing tools, and collection software. Every Dutch entrepreneur who drops a payment link into an invoice email is already living inside embedded finance without thinking of it that way. The next layer being added on top is programmable payments, where software triggers a payment automatically once a condition is met, with no manual click required from anyone.
Lending is where the most consequential change is happening for Dutch MKB specifically. Traditional bank credit for a small or medium Dutch business typically means a four-to-six-week application process, a relationship manager, financial statements, and a fair amount of documentation. Embedded lending offers a genuinely different path. Platforms such as Adyen Capital and Mollie Capital assess a business's creditworthiness in something close to real time, using transaction data, invoice flow, and open banking access to the account itself rather than a paper application. A Dutch BV with twelve consistent months of revenue data can receive a working capital offer directly inside the software it already uses, with a decision measured in minutes rather than weeks, simply because the data needed to make that decision was already sitting there.
Insurance is emerging as the third significant area, still earlier in its development than payments or lending. Professional liability cover offered the moment a DGA sets up payroll. Device insurance embedded at the point of an electronics purchase. Freight insurance folded into a logistics booking. Health coverage offered the instant a new employee gets added to payroll. Dutch entrepreneurs who have historically dealt with insurance through a broker or a standalone insurer's website will increasingly find coverage simply offered in context, right at the moment the underlying risk is actually created.
Banking accounts themselves make up the fourth area, and this one is easy to overlook precisely because it looks so ordinary from the outside. A Dutch entrepreneur's choice of business bank account now stretches well beyond the three big banks and a handful of standalone fintechs, to include accounts embedded directly inside accounting platforms, payroll software, and broader business management tools. The account still functions like a bank account, still carries an IBAN, still processes SEPA payments, but the actual relationship sits with the software company rather than with a bank encountered directly.
Wealth and investment is the least developed vertical today, but arguably the most significant for what comes next: pension savings embedded into ZZP platforms, investment products offered once a BV's retained earnings cross some threshold, even carbon tracking layered onto payment data. All of this is early-stage, but the direction is already clear enough to plan around. Since several of these decisions, particularly around credit and retained earnings, sit close to a business's overall tax position, how much tax you pay is worth reading alongside this for that broader context.
What This Means When You Choose Your Financial Tools
The practical consequence of all this for a Dutch entrepreneur evaluating their financial setup is that the relevant question stops being "which bank should I use" and becomes "which platform, or set of platforms, should I use, and what financial capability do they actually embed."
A Dutch BV running its bookkeeping on a platform that also provides the business bank account itself, with an NL IBAN, integrated reconciliation, and a real-time balance visible right inside the accounting interface, is making a genuinely different choice from one using a separate bank connected to separate bookkeeping software through an open banking import. The first setup eliminates a daily reconciliation step entirely, removes the periodic re-authentication friction that comes with a separate bank connection, and gives the platform enough visibility into the business's full financial position to offer better credit terms, smarter invoicing prompts, and more accurate automated tax preparation.
Neno's own model in the Dutch market is one concrete example of this pattern: a business account embedded directly inside a bookkeeping and payroll platform, meaning the bank data is natively available to the accounting engine without needing any separate open banking connection or a manual file upload at all. That is what embedded banking actually looks like from the inside, not as an abstract technology concept but as a daily workflow with one fewer step in it.
The embedded lending comparison makes the practical difference just as concrete. A Dutch BV founder who needs 50,000 euros in working capital has two genuinely different paths available. The traditional bank route takes weeks, demands financial statements, and produces a fixed loan on fixed repayment terms. An embedded lending offer from the same founder's bookkeeping or payment platform can arrive proactively, built entirely from data the platform already holds, and be accepted in minutes rather than negotiated over weeks. For a business with healthy revenue and steady invoice flow, embedded lending is increasingly going to be the faster option, and sometimes the better-priced one too.
Watch out: A financial product embedded inside a software platform is only as reliable as that platform and the regulated banking partner sitting behind it. Before treating an embedded account as your primary business account, it is worth knowing which regulated institution actually holds your deposits, which country's deposit guarantee scheme protects those funds (up to 100,000 euros per depositor under EU rules), and what happens to your account access if the software company itself stops trading. These are exactly the questions you would ask of any ordinary bank, and they apply just as much here.
Working through decisions like this is exactly the kind of moment where a second opinion earns its cost; accountant or bookkeeper covers where that kind of professional guidance typically fits into financial tool decisions like these.
What Comes Next, and Why It Matters for Dutch Entrepreneurs
The current state of embedded finance in the Netherlands is mostly payments, with lending catching up fast behind it. What comes next is being driven by a regulatory development most Dutch entrepreneurs have not heard of yet, alongside a technological shift that is arriving faster than the regulatory framework can really document it.
FiDA, the Financial Data Access regulation, is the EU's attempt to extend the open banking principle well beyond payment accounts alone. Where PSD2 opened up bank accounts to authorised third-party access, FiDA is aimed at doing the same for pension accounts, insurance products, investment portfolios, and other categories of financial data currently locked inside separate systems. Once that framework activates, an accounting platform could plausibly access a DGA's pension data directly, a payroll platform could see the full insurance picture across an entire team, and a financial dashboard could show a Dutch BV's complete financial position across every provider it uses, all in one place. Pension savings woven into salary workflows, insurance offered exactly when a risk event occurs, investment offers triggered by accumulated BV reserves crossing some threshold: none of this exists yet in the Netherlands in any real form, but each piece becomes far more plausible as FiDA moves through its remaining legislative stages toward implementation.
AI-driven credit assessment is the second major shift arriving in parallel. The current generation of embedded lending already leans on transaction history and invoice data to judge creditworthiness. The next generation is aiming further, at predictive models that weigh what is likely to happen rather than only what already has: seasonal revenue patterns, client concentration risk, debtor days trending in one direction or another. A fintech with two years of open banking data on a single entrepreneur can, in principle, build a sharper credit picture than a bank relationship manager working from quarterly statements alone, and several Dutch and Belgian fintechs already have this running in pilot today.
The third development worth watching closely is specific to ZZP founders rather than BVs. With a mandatory AOV obligation for the self-employed expected around 2027, and pension policy reform continuing alongside it, embedded pension and disability insurance products built directly into freelancer platforms look almost inevitable rather than merely likely. A ZZP founder registering a business on a Dutch platform being offered pension and AOV coverage as a natural part of onboarding, with premiums drawn automatically and no separate visit to a pension fund or insurer required, is not a speculative future scenario so much as the obvious next product for any platform already serving that audience at scale. Since this whole shift traces back to the same open banking foundation covered earlier, PSD2 and open banking is worth revisiting once FiDA starts to move from legislative proposal into something entrepreneurs actually encounter day to day.
FAQs
What is embedded finance?
Embedded finance is when a financial product, a payment, a loan, insurance, or a bank account, appears directly inside a non-financial platform or workflow the user is already using, rather than requiring a separate visit to a bank, insurer, or lender.
What is the difference between embedded finance and open banking?
Open banking is the regulatory and technical foundation that lets third parties access bank account data with consent. Embedded finance is what gets built on top of that foundation: the actual financial products, lending, insurance, banking accounts, that show up inside software as a result.
What is Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS)?
BaaS is when a licensed financial institution offers its core banking capabilities, IBAN issuance, payment processing, card issuing, as an API that other companies can call. This lets a non-bank software company offer a genuine bank account without holding a banking licence itself.
How does embedded lending work for Dutch businesses?
An embedded lender assesses creditworthiness using real-time data the platform already has access to, transaction history, invoice flow, and open banking data, rather than requiring a separate paper application. This allows a credit decision in minutes rather than the weeks a traditional bank loan typically takes.
Is my money safe in an embedded bank account?
Generally yes, provided the underlying provider is a properly licensed and regulated bank or e-money institution. The deposit guarantee scheme protecting your funds, typically up to 100,000 euros per depositor, applies to that regulated entity, so it is worth confirming which institution actually holds the money behind the interface you see.
What Dutch companies are using embedded finance?
Adyen and Mollie both offer embedded payment and lending products to their merchants. ABN AMRO runs an API marketplace for corporate clients. Neno embeds a business bank account directly inside its bookkeeping and payroll platform, and iDEAL itself is a widely used embedded payment mechanism across Dutch e-commerce and invoicing.
What is FiDA and how does it affect embedded finance?
FiDA, the Financial Data Access regulation, extends the open banking principle beyond payment accounts to cover pensions, insurance, and investment data. Once active, it is expected to enable a much wider range of embedded financial products beyond banking and payments alone.
How does embedded finance affect how I choose a business bank account?
It shifts the real question from which bank to use toward which platform to build your financial operations around, since the bank account itself may now be one feature embedded inside broader bookkeeping, payroll, or payment software rather than a standalone product chosen separately.
Will embedded finance replace traditional banks?
Not entirely. Regulated banking institutions, or BaaS providers holding banking licences, still sit behind almost every embedded product, providing the deposit protection and regulatory compliance. What is changing is where the customer relationship and the day-to-day interface actually live, not who ultimately holds the licence.
What is the embedded finance market worth in the Netherlands?
The Dutch embedded finance market was valued at roughly 12.41 billion US dollars in 2025, with projections putting it near 18 billion by 2030, reflecting rapid growth across payments, lending, insurance, banking, and wealth products combined.
Written by
Nick Knuppe
CEO & Founder
