Embedded Finance in the wellness industry | Goldman Sachs receives warning for its Fintech unit | Update on our Job Board

Hi friends

The summer is finally over, and Embedded Finance has produced a good amount of news for us!

I have packaged them for you in this crisp newsletter. In this edition, we cover:

• 💇‍♀️ Moxie is bringing Embedded Finance to the wellness industry

• ⚠️ Goldman Sachs receives a warning for it’s Fintech unit, and it won’t be the last in the industry

• 👩‍💻 Three new jobs on the Job Board

• 😍 And so much more.

Before diving into the newsletter, I want to give you a few updates:

Job Board

In the last edition, I announced the Embedded Finance Job Board. I received lots of positive feedback, which convinced me to continue this. But I need two things from you:

• Please continue to share jobs from any Embedded Finance stakeholder (brand, infrastructure provider, bank, consulting, etc.) with me.

• If you are open to a new opportunity and are considering a role in Embedded Finance, please submit your profile. Important: I will NOT share the list or any names on it with anybody. I will send YOU relevant job openings that I come across and see as a good fit. This will also include jobs not mentioned in this job board.

But there are also some tweaks to the Job Board:

• I will focus on jobs in Europe (predominantly the EU and UK) for the time being. This will help me learn and improve this section.

• Jobs on the Job Board will be anonymized without a company name. If you are interested in any role, please reply to this email.

• Why? Firstly, this will help me understand better what roles you are interested in, and secondly, I can learn about the value of this job board, which helps me in discussions with companies that are hiring.

Berlin Event

• Our second Embedded Finance event is coming up on October 12th in Berlin. If you haven’t registered yet, make sure to get your free ticket soon, as there are not many left.

• I will share the final agenda and other event details in the next newsletter edition.

Moxie raises Series A to grow Embedded Finance in the Wellness Industry

Moxie is a vertical service provider in the US and announced that it raised USD 15.7 million as part of its Series A funding. Moxie is targeting the wellness industry, or more precisely, it is offering a solution for medical spa owners. Medical spas, often referred to as "medspas," are facilities that blend medical treatments with the relaxation and aesthetics of a traditional spa setting. They offer a range of non-invasive cosmetic procedures and therapeutic treatments under the supervision of licensed medical professionals, catering to individuals seeking both rejuvenation and wellness enhancements.

Moxie is offering services where it is helping entrepreneurs set up a new medspa, and additionally, it is offering Moxie Suite, a vertical SaaS. The SaaS product covers areas such as patient management, marketing features, and templates for various areas.

As part of their Embedded Finance offering, Moxie is offering its customers a payment solution that enables the medspa owner to receive payments at their point of sale. According to TechCrunch, Moxie is also offering a banking product, which they call Moxie Balance. A banking product from an embedded finance company called ‘Balance’? Sounds familiar? Yes, it is indeed the same name that Shopify has chosen for their own banking product. Additionally, both companies started with a payment product before adding other financial features.

You might be surprised, but I have close to zero knowledge about the medspa industry. Luckily, working in Embedded Finance means you can learn about so many different areas. I would not have expected to find an Embedded Finance solution in the wellness industry, but I have come to realize that for vertical SaaS, it doesn’t matter what industry you are in. When you find product-market fit, you can add financial services to turn your business into a flywheel. Moxie’s unique advantage is that they can help new medspa owners open a new clinic much faster (less than 60 days compared to six months) and cheaper (USD 30k instead of USD 163k) than they would without Moxie. This creates an unfair advantage and helps grow their user base for the SaaS product. With Embedded Finance, Moxie can now increase revenue per customer and create additional lock-in effects. Payments and banking seem like the right start. I wonder if they will use their banking product as a platform to launch other financial products, especially for lending. This could include financing and lending products for the spa owners themselves, but perhaps also embedded lending to enable the medspa patients to receive financing for a treatment?

Infrastructure News

Friction between a regulator and financial institutions that are involved in Banking-as-a-Service or Embedded Finance could be a story in every single Embedded Finance Review edition. Because there are so many news stories around it—Solaris in Germany or Railsr in Lithuania, just to name two from the past few weeks. And now we can add none other than Goldman Sachs to this list. Goldman Sachs has received a warning from the regulator for its compliance oversight in its Fintech unit. Customers of Goldman Sachs include some of the biggest names in Fintech, including Wise (formerly Transferwise) and Stripe. The regulator identified insufficient due diligence and monitoring, which was apparently the case when working with non-regulated companies. Following this warning, Goldman Sachs has paused taking on additional customers in this ‘high-risk’ category.

We all know that compliance is a tough nut for many financial institutions. Thanks to new technology and new service providers, we do see improvements, but it’s taking a lot longer than many of us expected. The challenge is the area between technology and compliance, where everything needs to work “hand-in-hand” but so often doesn’t.

This also means that compliance in the world of BaaS / Embedded Finance is even harder because you add more parties to the mix:

Financial institution → BaaS → Non-financial brand → Customer

In this example, there are four parties involved in delivering an Embedded Finance product. Depending on the exact model (and its variations), each provider has a certain set of responsibilities. In an ideal world, everything would go according to this plan. But very often, the world is more complex than the plan, or providers are not able to perform the tasks, they said they would do. In the example above, there are many “hand-overs”, and thus, many chances for something to “fall through the crack," especially when comparing it to traditional banking. That is one of the biggest challenges in Embedded Finance. Luckily, we see many companies working on a solution for these problems, but we don’t know yet how long it will take to get there.

If you are interested in diving a bit deeper into this topic, go check out BaaS, Compliance, and the path forward for community banks.