Tearsheet’s Embedded Conference Preview: Richie Serna, Finix

Finix CEO Richie Serna is one of our speakers at Embedded, our first-of-its-kind conference on Embedded Finance. Finance is spreading to every industry and every app. To keep the conversation and networking levels high, we’ve limited the number of seats to 100. Secure your spot.

Payments are everywhere: "There’s a verticalization of payments going on. The next generation of billion dollar payments companies aren’t going to look like Stripe or Square. They’re going to be vertical-specific software companies with payments layered into them. What you start to see is that payments is seeping deeper into software."

The benefits of bringing payments in-house: "It’s two pieces: bringing payments in-house sees an improved user experience and more profit. We talked about an improved monetization strategy. Payments is now an indistinguishable part of the value proposition — it touches every part of the end-user experience. For a B2B software platform, they have to give the best purchase experience and merchant experience, managing both sides of the transaction."

"By bringing payments in-house, software companies allow for an automated and seamless underwriting process for their merchants and have full control over how often and frequent they pay out their sub-merchants. Some of these software vendors provide a more innovative disbursement mechanism, like Visa Direct and Mastercard Send. They can push out payments to a merchant instantly (or less than 30 minutes), instead of waiting for ACH. They can provide a better user experience for buyers. They provide more robust data to merchants. There’s so much to be done by bringing payments in-house."

The challenge of bringing payments in-house: "Historically, bringing payments in-house was difficult from a time, complexity, and management perspective. You’re looking at two to three years before you can run your first transaction. You’re looking at hiring a team of 10 to 15 engineers and a $5 million investment. And once you build it, it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it model. The payments ecosystem is constantly changing: there are new acceptance methods, new compliance rules, and data legacy infrastructure issues."

"Look at a company like Airbnb. It has over 170 people on its payment team and 110 payment engineers. It’s very complex work. Our view is that rather than building out all these internal payment capabilities, companies can outsource them to us so that they can focus on building out what’s really core to their businesses and customers."

Investors: Finix has raised $17.5 million from investors including Bain Capital, Homebrew, Insight Capital, and Visa.

Hear from Finix's Serna, as well as executives from other leading Embedded Finance companies like Cambr, MX, Synapse, and Marqeta. Get tickets here.