Squarespace’s Corey Zettler on building a financial services suite for small businesses

For two decades, Squarespace has been the platform entrepreneurs turn to when they want to build something that looks like they hired a designer. But over the past few years, something has changed. Squarespace has been building a financial stack. Payments launched in 2023. Capital followed in 2025, offering merchants flexible financing based on their sales history. And just two weeks ago, Squarespace launched Balance, a native business financial account integrated directly with Squarespace Payments, giving merchants a business Visa card, cash rewards, and faster access to their funds, all without leaving the platform.

It’s a familiar playbook, Shopify has run it, Stripe has run it, but Squarespace is doing it for a specific kind of entrepreneur: the creative, the maker, the small business owner who wants to run their whole business from one place. 

Today I’m joined by the person architecting that vision. Corey Zettler is Director of Product, Financial Solutions at Squarespace, where he leads strategy across Payments, Capital, and Checkout. Before Squarespace, Corey spent more than 15 years at companies like Shutterstock, MakerBot, and Chief, and before that he was a wealth planner, which means he came into product from the money side, not the tech side, which makes him an interesting person to think about what financial services actually needs to do for real people.

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From website builder to financial services platform

Squarespace has been around for 20-plus years and is known for beautiful website design and getting online presence up and running easily for users. There’s always been a need to grow a business, it was just primarily done as a secondary nature. If you wanted to transact, you could connect different processors and different systems, and Squarespace was happy to facilitate that.

With the pandemic and the advent of more people coming online to share their expertise and grow their business, it became more important for Squarespace to take more ownership of that process, to enable more flexibility, the way it had already done on the website side, but now for the financial side as well.

Squarespace payments: the first step

Squarespace Payments launched in 2023 to a small group of users, then more broadly in 2024. It was the first product introduced for what would become the larger financial suite. The main driver was offering flexibility for merchants who needed a little more than they were getting off the shelf from Stripe, PayPal, and similar processors, wrapped in Squarespace’s all-in-one mentality and design sensibility.

Merchants had already been transacting on Squarespace for years, so the use case was proven. The goal was to bring everything they wanted to do more of, right up front, with that Squarespace experience around it.

Listening to merchants: The case for liquidity

After launching payments, the biggest feedback from merchants was the need for liquidity. Think of a photographer who gets paid on a Friday night, has two more shoots Saturday, and needs to hire a second shooter. How do they fund that part of their business if they’re waiting on normal settlement times?

That demand made instant payouts and capital natural next steps. Instant payouts — giving merchants quick access to their funds — has been live for about six to eight months and is available to all merchants at no extra cost.

Squarespace Capital: Funding the gaps

Squarespace Capital launched in January 2025. It’s designed for merchants who don’t necessarily need emergency cash but need to fund inventory, float between jobs, or replenish stock after a big sale. The product was built with partners to provide that access to liquidity quickly and with easy repayment — all within the Squarespace ecosystem.

Balance: The integrated business account

Balance stemmed from wanting to extend the payments experience, not create a separate bank account that merchants had to go open and connect to everything else. The goal was to have it feel all-in-one, consistent with everything else Squarespace had built.

Balance sits as an integrated part of the Squarespace Payments account. Merchants get a Visa debit card, easy access to their funds, and rewards, all flowing through the same seamless cycle. It launched to new merchants first, with existing merchants coming soon. Early feedback has essentially been: how do I get access to this faster?

Build vs. buy: Why Stripe

Squarespace is not a bank and doesn’t hold itself out to be one. The company partners with Stripe to facilitate the financial products. Partnering allowed Squarespace to move quickly, stand up products it may not have had time to build from scratch, and start iterating based on real merchant feedback almost immediately. After launching payments, capital, and balance, the team now has a solid playbook for how to bring financial products to market.

Organizational impact: Building for fintech from the inside

Squarespace has had strong support from leadership to invest in this space over the past few years. The product and engineering team jumped into these problems and was able to move fast. AI has also accelerated iteration, helping the team get things out faster and make updates to products more quickly. That speed is becoming a competitive advantage.

Legal and regulatory hurdles

One thing that’s hard to fully plan for the first time: the legal and compliance process around establishing financial accounts. Understanding those hurdles and moving through them as cleanly and efficiently as possible was critical. Now that Squarespace has done it across multiple products, the playbook is much clearer.

How Squarespace thinks about competition

Shopify, Wix, WordPress, WooCommerce, they’re all doing versions of the same thing, and they set the table for what’s possible in embedded finance and what trust looks like. For Squarespace, the differentiator is design. Design leads, and then the financial products amplify it. For merchants — especially service sellers — who come to Squarespace for beautiful, easy-to-use tools, the financial suite should feel the same way: no unnecessary friction, nothing complex.

Service commerce: The emerging identity

Squarespace is increasingly positioning itself not just as a website builder but as the destination for service sellers, people who sell their time, expertise, and experience. The financial suite is central to that positioning. As the service commerce ecosystem grows, having payments, capital, and balance all integrated becomes a reason to choose Squarespace in the first place, not just an add-on.

What small businesses really need

Time is the currency of a small business owner, and their time gets pulled in a million directions. What Squarespace is trying to do is give as much of that time back as possible. Thinking about cash flow, how to scale, what to do with the money when it’s flowing, that shouldn’t be top of mind. Making those parts frictionless is the goal, so merchants can focus on growing in the ways Squarespace can’t play in.

AI’s role in financial services for small businesses

There’s a lot of regulation in financial services, so AI isn’t a silver bullet, but it has a real role. Internally, AI has helped Squarespace iterate faster, get products out quicker, and reduce time on more routine tasks. Looking ahead, the industry is moving toward AI playing a larger role in money movement and financial tooling. Squarespace wants to be involved early when that shift happens.

What’s next

On the roadmap: expansion of capital and balance on a more global scale, and deeper functionality around what merchants do with their funds once they have them, bill pay, employee payroll, the everyday mechanics of running a business. The goal is for the balance account to be the center of that experience, not just another tool merchants have to connect.