The “Pay in 4” button at online checkout is not a bank. Neither is the split-invoice option inside a SaaS dashboard, nor the embedded loan offer sitting inside a ride-hailing driver’s app. All three are businesses that have built financial products directly into their software without owning a banking licence. The market for that plumbing, known as embedded finance, reached $107.27 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to hit $588.49 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.
How the market grew to $107 billion
The term “embedded finance” barely registered in mainstream banking coverage a decade ago. What changed was where customers expected to encounter financial products. Loans moved from branches to checkout pages. Insurance shifted from brokers to booking flows. Debit cards started showing up inside payroll apps and freelancer platforms rather than inside a bank’s own mobile app.
Grand View Research put the global market at $83.32 billion in 2023 and $107.27 billion in 2024, a jump driven largely by embedded payments, which accounted for 28.14% of revenue that year. North America held 29.0% of the global market, and the firm’s forecast puts the compound annual growth rate at 32.8% through 2030. The US segment alone, valued at $15.36 billion in 2023, is expected to grow at a 32.0% CAGR.
Three technical shifts pushed the market past its early-adopter phase. Open banking APIs matured from experimental features into production infrastructure, giving non-bank platforms a reliable way to move money and pull account data. Modular banking-as-a-service providers, including Unit, Treasury Prime, and Column, lowered the cost of issuing a card or opening a ledger from months of regulatory work to days of engineering. Faster payment rails, notably the US FedNow service launched in July 2023, made real-time settlement available to platforms that had previously relied on slower ACH transfers.
Those numbers describe revenue captured by the providers and platforms that enable these integrations, not the volume of money flowing through them. The volume side is larger and more revealing.
What the transaction volume looks like
Bain & Company’s embedded finance research, which focuses on US activity, measured $2.6 trillion in financial services transactions embedded into e-commerce and other software platforms in 2021. That was roughly 5% of total US financial transactions. The firm’s 2026 forecast pushes the figure past $7 trillion, or more than 10% of total US transaction value.
Platform and enabler revenue, according to Bain, follows a similar curve: $22 billion in 2021, rising to a projected $51 billion by 2026, a 19% compound annual growth rate. Buy now, pay later, a subset of embedded consumer credit, is forecast to grow from $50 billion in 2021 volume to $265 billion in 2026. B2B payments, a less visible but larger category, moves from $0.7 trillion to $2.6 trillion over the same period.
The distinction matters for anyone sizing the opportunity. Grand View’s figure measures revenue captured by platforms. Bain’s figure measures transaction value flowing through them. They describe different layers of the same market, and the ratio between them, roughly one dollar of platform revenue per $100 of transaction volume, is what makes embedded finance economically attractive for software companies with existing customer bases.
| Metric | Current value | Forecast | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global embedded finance revenue | $107.27B (2024) | $588.49B (2030) | Grand View Research |
| Global CAGR, 2024 to 2030 | 32.8% | 32.8% | Grand View Research |
| US embedded transaction volume | $2.6T (2021) | $7T (2026) | Bain & Company |
| US platform and enabler revenue | $22B (2021) | $51B (2026) | Bain & Company |
| US BNPL transaction volume | $50B (2021) | $265B (2026) | Bain & Company |
| European embedded finance revenue | €20-30B (2023) | €100B+ (2030) | McKinsey |
| EU embedded share of banking revenue | 3% (2023) | 10-15% (2030) | McKinsey |
Sources: Grand View Research 2024; Bain & Company embedded finance research (US, 2021-2026 forecast); McKinsey July 2024 European embedded finance analysis.
Europe is running about two years behind the US
McKinsey’s July 2024 analysis of the European market estimated that embedded finance generated between €20 billion and €30 billion in European revenue in 2023, roughly 3% of total banking revenues on the continent. The firm’s 2030 forecast puts European revenue above €100 billion, with embedded channels accounting for 10% to 15% of banking revenue pools and 20% to 25% of retail and small-business lending revenue. Today that same share sits at 5% to 6%.
The speed of the shift shows up most clearly in buy now, pay later adoption. In seven European markets tracked by McKinsey, BNPL’s share of e-commerce sales went from 2% in 2016 to 10% in 2023. In the Nordic countries, point-of-sale financing volumes grew 8% to 10% annually between 2016 and 2022, roughly double the growth rate of other retail lending.
What Europe has not matched is the scale of merchant-native integrations seen in the US. Most European embedded lending still runs through partnerships between banks and merchants rather than merchant-owned stacks. McKinsey’s analysts expect both models to coexist, with partnership structures dominating fragmented verticals like fashion e-commerce, and merchant-owned stacks persisting in concentrated verticals like auto finance, where Volkswagen Credit and similar captive lenders already hold deep residual-value data that third-party providers cannot match.
Regulation is the other variable that separates the two regions. The European Union’s proposed Financial Data Access framework (FIDA) and the third Payment Services Directive are designed to widen the range of bank data that third parties can read and act on. If either passes in its current form, the set of financial products that can be delivered through non-bank channels expands meaningfully to cover mortgages, pensions, and non-life insurance. US regulators have not proposed an equivalent framework. The result is that European platforms may leapfrog parts of the US stack once the rules clarify, while US platforms continue to move faster on voluntary integrations in the meantime.
What this means for founders and investors
A company launching an embedded payments or lending product in 2026 is not building in a greenfield. The three largest segments, consumer payments, BNPL, and B2B payments, are already dominated by established players with existing distribution and regulatory infrastructure. Differentiation increasingly depends on verticalisation: fitting the financial product to a specific industry’s workflow rather than offering generic infrastructure.
Venture capital has noticed. Funding flows toward embedded finance platforms have held up even as broader fintech funding contracts. Neobanks are building embedded partnerships rather than waiting for customers to arrive at their apps. And the deposit-funded models improving fintech margins increasingly depend on embedded channels to generate those deposits in the first place.
For investors, the most useful question is not “how big is the market” but “which layer of the stack are you capturing?” Platform enablers like Stripe and Marqeta capture a thin slice of transaction revenue at high volume. Vertical embedders like Toast in restaurants or Procore in construction capture fewer transactions but more dollars per customer. Both models work. They are not interchangeable bets, and an investor who treats them as one portfolio risks mispricing the underwriting.
The $588 billion forecast is large enough to generate its own marketing momentum, which is usually a warning sign. The underlying composition of that number, however, is concrete: known transaction volumes, known platform revenues, known growth rates in specific verticals. The question for the next five years is not whether embedded finance matters to fintech strategy, but which of today’s platform models will own the rails when the category settles.
