Eduardo Martínez García Co-founder and CEO at Toqio
The leap from integration to orchestration
Over the past decade, embedded finance has transformed the relationship between companies, users, and financial services. It has enabled payments, loans, and insurance to become a natural part of digital experiences, from financing an online purchase to contracting insurance with a single click. According to the report published by Dealroom and ABN AMRO, the embedded finance market could reach $7.2 trillion by 2030, and today, nine out of ten of the world’s largest corporations already operate as financial ecosystems.
However, this model has largely remained horizontal. It has been a revolution of integration, but not of contextualization. APIs and modular platforms have made it easier to connect financial services, but not always to adapt them to the specificities of each industry. The next step, the one that will define the coming decade, is to rebuild finance around the operational context of each company, sector, or community.
Contextualized finance is not about adding financial services; it’s about orchestrating them. In other words, it means designing financial services based on the DNA of each ecosystem: its cash flows, data, supply chain, and regulatory dynamics. The goal is not only to reduce friction but also to generate growth, loyalty, and resilience.
That is precisely the purpose of Solutioning, Toqio’s new service, which aims to guide and support companies and organizations that want to embark on the path toward contextualized finance, unlocking all the value it holds.
The power of contextualizing
The difference may seem subtle, but it’s transformative. Embedded finance allows, for example, a customer to split their purchase into three payments. Contextualized finance enables a food company to access working capital aligned with seasonal demand, or a logistics operator to receive instant payments synchronized with shipping cycles. It’s not about offering credit, but about designing liquidity around the real behavior of the business.
This shift is driven by three converging forces: the technological maturity of fintech infrastructure (where AI has an enormous impact as we’ll see), an increasingly demanding regulatory framework, and the partial withdrawal of banks from SME lending, which has opened space for new alliances between corporations and fintechs.
All this creates the perfect ground for a new generation of intelligent, connected, and sector-specific financial solutions. And AI is actually an accelerator of it. AI is already transforming how products, flows, and orchestrations are contextualized allowing continuous personalization in real time at the level of each sector, client, and moment. This will unlock unprecedented productivity and customer value like:
- Wider adoption of contextualized finance across B2B ecosystems, particularly in manufacturing, logistics, and retail.
- Stronger partnerships between corporates, banks, and fintechs, where AI becomes the engine that coordinates and scales these ecosystems.
- A growing emphasis on AI-driven, data-based credit models, with real-time insights and predictive capabilities becoming standard in SME financing.
See how Eduado explains the concept of contextualized finance.
When contextualization becomes tangible
To understand the impact of contextualization, one only needs to look at what’s already happening in the market.
Toast, a technology platform for restaurants, has become a standout example, reaching payment volumes of around $41.7 billion. By building financial products around restaurants’ daily operations, Toast has gone beyond payment processing to offer credit that fits the business realities of small and medium-sized enterprises within its ecosystem, companies that often can’t find similar alternatives in traditional banking.
The same is happening in Spain, where Mahou, one of the country’s most iconic beer producers, is reinventing how it supports its extensive distributor network. By integrating revenue collection and financing tools directly into its merchant ecosystem, Mahou is not only strengthening partnerships but also setting ambitious growth goals: incorporating tens of thousands of SMEs and aiming for a significant expansion of its revenue by 2030.
Even in social and humanitarian contexts, the concept of contextualized finance is proving transformative. One of the world’s largest international organizations has adopted contextualized disbursement platforms to deliver aid more effectively in fragile regions. The focus here is on transparency, compliance, and speed, ensuring that resources reach the right people, in the right way, at the right time.
What emerges is a powerful truth: when finance adapts to context, it not only creates economic value, it can also drive profound social impact.
In all cases, the logic remains the same: when finance aligns with context, it ceases to be a complementary service and becomes the engine of the ecosystem.
A new opportunity for companies and banks
For corporations, this evolution presents a unique opportunity: to move from being product or service providers to becoming orchestrators of financial ecosystems. By integrating tailored services into their networks of distributors, partners, or clients, they can strengthen loyalty, reduce churn, and generate new revenue streams, all without becoming banks themselves.
For financial institutions, contextualized finance opens the door to a new era of SME engagament. Through corporate ecosystems, banks can lend more efficiently and with less risk, leveraging real-time data and existing relationships among participants.
Embedded finance was the starting point: it made financial services more accessible. Contextualized finance is the next frontier: it makes them relevant, resilient, and growth-oriented.
At Toqio, we believe this is not just another step in the evolution of embedded finance, it is the very future of finance, and we want to create it with you.
By Eduardo Martínez García Co-Founder and CEO at Toqio