We’ve spent the last few years watching embedded finance move from a buzzword to a fully-fledged industry shift. The infrastructure is there, the APIs are slick, and everyone from e-commerce platforms to ride-hailing apps is finding ways to build financial services into their user experience. But here’s the thing no one wants to say too loudly, infrastructure on its own is not enough.
Plugging in a payment API doesn’t make your business “financial.” Embedding finance isn’t about bolting on a new feature; it’s about rethinking how money moves, who controls it, and how those experiences feel to the end user. And for that, we don’t just need infrastructure. We need orchestration.
Why infrastructure alone falls short
Let’s be honest, the industry’s early obsession with infrastructure made sense. We needed rails. We needed compliance. We needed the boring bits that make money flow safely from one place to another. But too many companies stop there. They pick a BaaS provider, connect a few APIs, and assume the job is done. Then they wonder why adoption is low or user satisfaction flatlines.
The problem is that financial services don’t live in isolation. They’re not stand-alone tools. They’re deeply tied to the user journey, to operations, to brand, and to trust. If your embedded finance offer doesn’t talk to your onboarding system, your CRM, your customer support flow — you’re creating more complexity, not less.
Orchestration is about pulling those threads together. It’s not a product, it’s a mindset. It’s asking: how do we make the financial experience feel like part of the platform, not a separate detour?
Where orchestration creates real impact
When done well, orchestration shows up quietly and the user barely notices it, but they feel it. It’s the freelancer platform that offers a bank account, invoicing tools, and instant payment in one flow. It’s the small business dashboard that lets you see your balance, access credit, and pay invoices without logging into a separate app or waiting three days for verification. It’s seamless, invisible, and intuitive.
More importantly, orchestration unlocks value for the business itself. It reduces manual work and cuts costs. It gives teams better visibility into how money is moving and where the bottlenecks are. And crucially, it builds trust with users, because the experience feels thought through, not stitched together with duct tape.
The challenge of doing orchestration well
Of course, if this were easy, everyone would already be doing it. The reality is that orchestration is hard because it sits at the intersection of tech, product, compliance, and user experience. It requires you to think not just about what your customer wants today, but what they might need next, and how those needs connect across systems.
Too many companies are still thinking in silos. Product teams talk to engineers, and compliance teams sit in another room. Customer support deals with the fallout, and nobody is stepping back to look at the whole journey. What you end up with is a patchwork of tools that work on paper but feel clunky in practice.
Orchestration forces you to zoom out. It means designing flows, not features. It means building with context. And yes, it means making some hard decisions about which parts of the stack you control and which ones you leave to partners.
Real orchestration needs real ownership
One of the most overlooked parts of orchestration is ownership. If you don’t own the decision-making around how financial services integrate into your platform, you won’t be able to deliver the experience your users deserve. You’ll be at the mercy of your providers’ roadmaps, limitations, and bugs. That’s fine if you’re just looking for a quick win, but it’s not sustainable if you want embedded finance to be a core part of your business model.
Ownership doesn’t mean building everything from scratch — that would be madness for most companies. But it does mean having the architecture, the relationships, and the internal clarity to decide how financial experiences are delivered, updated, and scaled. If you’re just a passenger on someone else’s infrastructure, you’re never really in control.
The future of embedded finance is orchestration-first
We’re entering a new phase of embedded finance — one where just being “connected” isn’t enough. Businesses are starting to realise that value doesn’t come from the presence of financial services, but from the way they’re delivered, personalised, and integrated. That’s orchestration.
It’s not the flashiest part of the conversation, but it’s the one that decides whether a user sticks around or bounces. Whether a CFO sees value or complexity. Whether embedded finance becomes just another checkbox or something that drives real business transformation.
And maybe that’s the shift we need, to stop thinking about embedded finance as a set of tools and start seeing it as a strategy. Infrastructure got us here. Orchestration is what will take us forward.
- Fintech & Insurtech