Wix enters a strategic partnership with Worldline; what does this mean for their embedded finance stack?

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Hi embedded finance friend

I spent the past weekend at the food fair Grüne Woche in Berlin and promoted my wife’s snack startup to at least a couple of hundred guests. So if you know me, you can probably imagine how glad I was that I had zero calls scheduled for Monday and was able to work quietly on this newsletter and a couple of projects :-)

This edition covers

• Are in-car payments the future of automotive commerce?

• Worldline joins forces with SaaS website builder Wix

• Finmid extends lending coverage to twenty countries

• Link section

And now let’s dive in 👇

In two weeks, we will welcome the local embedded finance crowd to our fifth Embedded Finance Review event, which will take place on February 11th in Frankfurt.

And more than two-thirds of the available tickets are already gone, so register soon.

Are in-car payments the future of automotive commerce?

In the newest podcast episode, I speak with Mark Gerban. Mark is a former Mercedes-Benz executive and current Head of Product at Pairpoint. In our chat, Mark shares his unique insights:

• How manufacturers are transforming cars into payment devices

• The technical infrastructure behind car payments

• Why some approaches succeed while others fail

• The role of emerging technologies like embedded SIMs

I learned a lot in this discussion. Thus, whether you're interested in automotive innovation or embedded finance, this episode should get you up to speed on the topic of in-car payments: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

Worldline joins forces with SaaS website builder Wix

What happened: French payment giant Worldline has announced a strategic partnership with website builder Wix (Finextra). The partnership works in both ways, where existing Worldline customers can access Wix website-building capabilities more quickly. For us, much more interesting, Wix will implement Worldline’s payment features.

My comment: Unlike Shopify, Wix offers a website builder for many use cases, including simple landing pages or blogs. That being said, Wix also strongly focuses on the e-commerce segment and offers an e-commerce website solution, including a payment acceptance (very similar to Shopify). With the new partnership, Wix plans to grow its offering by supporting more local currencies and expanding to other countries. Wix announced it will roll out the latest features from this Worldline partnership in Europe and the Asia Pacific.

So far, the partnership seems entirely focused on closing these “geographic gaps,” but when I see a collaboration in this space, I cannot help but wonder if Wix is also working on other financial products. Shopify’s success in financial services is heavily built in the US, where approx. 57% of their merchants are based, and only approx. 30% of Wix’s merchants are US-based. However, integrated financing options for Wix’s merchants still seem a no-brainer, even in Europe. This is not something Worldline can help with, but who knows—maybe this partnership will free up resources on Wix’s side to tackle this area.

Finmid extends lending coverage to twenty countries

What happened: German embedded lending provider Finmid announced that it had added eight new countries to its supported country list, bringing the total to twenty (Yahoo Finance). With the launch in Austria, Cyprus, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, the company focused on closing the gap in Eastern and Southern Europe and now covering most of Europe. The one missing country that stands out is France, apparently a tougher nut to crack.

My comment: Finmid enables fintech companies and non-financial brands to offer financing products to their SME customers. Its most well-known partner is the food delivery platform Wolt, which allows thousands of restaurants to apply for financing directly through Wolt. However, the company also works with various B2B niche marketplaces and software providers for the travel industry.

While some infrastructure providers can expand “rather easily” from one EU market to another (e.g., banking-as-a-service in some cases), lending tends to be more challenging, as local regulations matter a lot. This probably also explains why Finmid is covering Cyprus but not France. That being said, covering twenty countries is pretty impressive, but I would also like to know the revenue breakdown for each country in 12-24 months.

Link section

• BaaS outlook brighter after a period of growing pains (Banking Dive).

• Australia tells BNPL providers to apply for credit licences (Finextra).

• Card issuance and programme management platform Highnote raises $90m and expands into merchant acquiring (Finextra).

• US financial institution KeyCorp eyes embedded banking expansion as deposits climb in Q4 (PYMNTS).

• Solar panel financing provider Bees & Bears secures €500M in debt (Tech.EU).