On those occasions that I stop and reflect, when I get out of the urgent stuff that drives my days, I ask myself a simple but uncomfortable question: what kind of impact are we actually creating? Not growth metrics. Not product launches. Impact.
After more than a decade in consultancy and fintech, I’ve learned that finance only earns its place when it improves real lives. And today, embedded finance gives us one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had to do exactly that.
When people talk about embedded finance, the conversation often starts in the wrong place: technology. But the real story is human. It’s about access, opportunity, and relevance. It’s about meeting people, businesses, and institutions where they already are, and giving them financial tools that actually respond to their needs.
As Peterson K. Ozili from the Central Bank of Nigeria explains in his research, financial inclusion has long been recognized as a powerful driver of poverty alleviation. Access to affordable financial services allows individuals to start businesses, generate income, and build resilience over time.
Embedded finance has fundamentally changed how financial inclusion is delivered. Instead of asking people to adapt to the financial system, the system adapts to them.
Ozili outlines this clearly: embedded finance shows up when people can access loans through an app without visiting a branch, pay digitally instead of in cash, transfer money without logging into a bank interface, buy insurance at the point of purchase, or access “buy now, pay later” options instantly. These aren’t marginal improvements: they remove friction from everyday economic life.
For underserved populations, especially in developing economies, this matters deeply. Accion, the global nonprofit focused on inclusive economies, highlights how embedded finance eliminates the need for long journeys to bank branches. That time saved translates directly into more time for farming, running a shop, or caring for family.
This is also what we focus on at Toqio: enabling financial services to meet people and businesses where they already are — embedded into the platforms, journeys, and ecosystems they trust.
Just as importantly, digital financial interactions create data footprints that allow individuals and micro-entrepreneurs to build credit histories they never had access to before.
This is impact at its most practical level.
Small and medium-sized enterprises sit at the center of this transformation. Globally, SMEs have struggled with access to capital not because they lack potential, but because traditional financial models were never designed for their realities. I myself have runned small and medium sized businesses for over a decade, and I know how many times not having access to the right financial products can make us struggle.
The World Bank, through analysis by Matthew Saal, makes this point very clear. Embedded finance allows lenders to assess creditworthiness using alternative data: transaction history, sales performance, supply-chain activity. Platforms like Shopify or Mercado Libre already do this at scale, offering financing precisely when merchants need it most.
This contextual approach changes how risk, access, and trust are built. It enables credit decisions that traditional banks would never make, not because they’re riskier, but because they’re better informed. Credit is no longer abstract; it’s embedded in real business activity.
From Toqio's perspective, this is where embedded finance moves from promise to practice. We see, again and again, that when financial products are designed around specific use cases, adoption increases, risk improves, and outcomes are better for everyone involved.
One narrative that urgently needs updating is the idea of banks versus fintechs. That story no longer reflects reality.
In our work at Toqio, we’ve seen firsthand that real progress comes from bringing the right players together. The most impactful solutions rarely come from one institution alone. Instead, we often find ourselves building ecosystems that include organisations that might once have been seen as competitors — from global banks to local champions, from long-established financial institutions to state-of-the-art fintechs. And every time, collaboration is what makes the outcome stronger.
As Tariq Bin Hendi, CEO of Astra Tech, writes for the World Economic Forum, what we are seeing instead is coopetition: fintechs bringing speed and specialization, banks bringing scale, trust, and capital. Embedded finance sits precisely at this intersection, where collaboration creates more value than competition ever could.
This collaborative model is especially visible in regions like the UAE, where embedded finance is growing at a projected CAGR of over 30%. But the lesson is global. The next wave of financial inclusion won’t come from branches or generic digital channels: it will come from contextual platforms that understand user behavior deeply and deliver financial services as part of daily workflows.
AI will accelerate this shift even further. Finance is becoming smarter due to real-time payments, personalized offers, dynamic risk assessment.
Research from Boston Consulting Group reinforces just how much of this opportunity still lies ahead. In North America and Europe, the total addressable market for embedded finance is estimated at $185 billion across payments, lending, accounts, and issuing. Yet penetration remains low due to solutions still designed from the inside out.
What’s striking is how vertical software platforms have already changed SME behavior. Businesses are comfortable running payments, invoicing, payroll, and reporting inside a single environment. Extending this logic to embedded finance is a natural next step.
And I’ve seen firsthand how the narrative is already shifting. Partners like Visa, for example, are not just participating in this space — they are actively evolving their focus, their development roadmaps, and their strategy around the belief that contextualised finance will be one of the defining drivers of the future.
But impact only happens when products are designed with intent. As BCG notes, offering the right financial product — whether insurance, BNPL, or working capital — depends entirely on understanding the context of the customer journey. Generic finance doesn’t scale. Contextual finance does.
Of course, none of this is without challenges.
Trust remains a barrier. As Ozili notes, some users are still hesitant to adopt third-party financial services. Regulation adds complexity. And as the World Bank warns, fragmented data ecosystems can prevent individuals and SMEs from building portable, recognized credit profiles.
This is where responsibility becomes non-negotiable. Open data frameworks, privacy-first design, and interoperability are not “nice to have.” Regulations like GDPR, which give individuals ownership over their data, are not obstacles to innovation; they are enablers of fairer outcomes.
But the ecosystem is also evolving. Increasingly, the most valuable context — the data, the sector-specific knowledge, the real understanding of customer behaviour — does not always sit within financial institutions themselves. It often lives within the corporate platforms, business networks, and trusted brands that customers already rely on every day.
The level of trust those players have built with their ecosystems is extraordinarily high. And that is exactly why building the right structures together — across industries, across roles, across traditional boundaries — is so essential for contextual finance to scale responsibly.
At Toqio, our role in this ecosystem is clear. We don’t believe in replacing existing financial institutions. Instead, we focus on making embedded finance real and executable. Our platform is designed to help banks, corporates, and institutions embed financial services responsibly, at scale, and with real impact.
When embedded finance works well, everyone wins:
As we begin 2026, this is the kind of impact we are committed to creating. Not finance for finance’s sake but finance that works, where it matters, for those who need it most.
And that, ultimately, is why embedded finance truly matters.
By Eduardo Martínez García, Co-Founder & CEO at Toqio