How Wix built payments, checking, and capital for 293 million users 

Although every company is becoming a fintech now, Wix didn’t set out to do so – the firm’s entry into financial services started from observing what millions of small business owners actually needed when building their online presence. For Amit Sagiv and Volodymyr Tsukur, co-heads of payments at Wix, the path to serving these SMB customers well was paved through financial products: Wix had to take the payment infrastructure it had built for itself and transform it into tools that could help merchants manage their businesses. 

The foundation was already there. Wix had developed sophisticated billing systems to support its freemium model, accumulating deep expertise in payment routing, risk management, and global processing. “We built tremendous payment capabilities,” Sagiv explained. “The billing manager of Wix wanted to take that offering and build a service for our users.”

What started as a small project evolved into a comprehensive financial platform serving businesses across the globe. The company now processes over $3 billion per quarter with a team of 160 people, covering payments, checking accounts, and capital lending. 

Listen to the podcast to hear how a chance collaboration between Wix’s billing team and gateway developers turned into a fintech operation processing billions quarterly. Sagiv and Tsukur discuss why they deliberately avoided becoming a full-fledged bank, and how website data reveals creditworthiness before transaction history does. It’s a conversation that dives deep into what it means to be serving SMB customers digitally and how firms can do embedded finance right. 

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Building a commodity 

Wix approached embedded finance with a different philosophy than most platforms. They didn’t want to create a walled garden around the financial products accessible only to top-tier users: “We tried to make what Sagiv described a commodity, not just something that a super premium user is getting as an extra layer of service,” Tsukur said.

This idea of universal access gels with the diversity of Wix’s user base. With 293 million users running everything from e-commerce stores to event management services, the platform needed solutions that could scale across vastly different business models.

Rethinking checking accounts around merchant needs

The Wix checking solution isn’t a copycat version of a traditional bank account; it’s focused on the most pressing problem merchants face: “Where is my money?”

Sagiv described how they built instant access to funds: “As you sell shoes, you can spend that money on our card in a phenomenal, smooth, and clear experience.” By leveraging the company’s control over payment flow and developing proprietary technology, Wix eliminated the waiting period between making a sale and accessing funds, a friction point that traditional banking infrastructure couldn’t easily solve.

The checking product also addresses another fundamental challenge: most small business owners lack clarity about their financial performance. “Many businesses don’t know,” Sagiv noted. “They say, I brought in 100 customers, 10 of them bought, it converted to $1,000. It’s very hard to do this association and attribution.” 

By connecting every transaction back to its origin, whether from a website lead or shop sale, the firm can provide merchants with granular visibility into what’s actually driving revenue.

Using proprietary data to expand capital access

Traditional lenders face a coverage problem when working with small businesses. They rely on transaction history and financial statements, which means newer merchants or those with irregular sales patterns often can’t qualify for financing. Wix solved this issue by tapping into data that banks don’t have access to.

“We see your website from A to Z, from the moment you launch it all the way till you churn,” Sagiv explained. “So we know the quality of your visits, the site quality, the readiness, the images, the text, and the product portfolio. We know if you’re legit or not before somebody else gets six months of transactional data.”

This broader view allowed Wix to double its capital eligibility while maintaining risk discipline. “If you want to provide capital, let’s imagine that you want to provide capital to everyone who is not a fraud. The only question is how much you can provide,” said Tsukur. 

Moving credit decisioning away from a binary yes or no to “how much?” has meant Wix can play a role in facilitating even a small $500 loan, which could be meaningful for a merchant’s first marketing campaign.

Building lean by focusing on experience over infrastructure

Wix deliberately chose not to become a bank. Instead, it partners with licensed entities while controlling the user experience. “When you’re trying to do too much and be responsible for everything, you are spread thin everywhere,” Tsukur said. “For Wix, it’s very clear that we are the interface through which users manage their business.”

This approach keeps the team focused on what creates the most value: building integration between business operations and financial management. The company maintains strong partnerships with major payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, and Adyen, leveraging their infrastructure while bringing enterprise-grade capabilities to small merchants who couldn’t access them directly.

The partnership-based strategy helps maintain quality and build resilience. The team has already navigated the turbulent US regulatory environment around embedded finance over the past year by working closely with partners like Unit and Lincoln Savings Bank, balancing compliance with user experience.

Looking ahead with AI-powered financial guidance

The firm’s future vision centers on using AI to make financial advisory services widely accessible. “We’re really eager to give the 99% the kind of service that only the 1% used to get,” Sagiv said. “This was always held back by financial efficiency – a bank couldn’t provide advisors to everybody.”

Wix is building conversational products that embed financial expertise directly into the platform, creating what Sagiv calls “segmentation (that is almost) of one, with specific guidance.” Rather than rigid flows that push every user through the same process, Wix’s strategy with AI may enables personalized experiences that adapt to individual business needs and contexts.

The company sees this technology as a vehicle for building trust. As buying behaviors shift and new channels emerge for discovering services, Wix aims to position its millions of merchants at the forefront of that change.