Shopify Capital originated $4.2 billion in merchant cash advances and loans in 2025, up from $3 billion in 2024. Wayflyer has deployed over $5 billion to more than 5,000 small businesses. Parafin has extended over $25 billion in offers across Amazon, DoorDash, Walmart, and dozens of vertical SaaS platforms. These numbers keep climbing because these companies figured out something traditional banks never did: the best way to underwrite a business is to watch it operate in real time, across every system where money moves.

The common thread is data. Not a single data source, but three layered together: banking transactions, accounting records, and commerce platform activity. Each source tells a different part of the story. Together they tell the whole thing.

What banking, accounting, and commerce data reveal to lenders

Banking data shows cash reality. It tracks what comes in and what goes out, including overdraft patterns and loan repayments to other lenders. When Wayflyer onboards an ecommerce merchant, the first thing they request is access to bank account data via open banking aggregators. Their underwriting team uses that transaction history to assess business performance and creditworthiness. But as Wayflyer discovered when scaling across markets, raw open banking data is messy. Transaction descriptions are inconsistent. Categorization is unreliable. They partnered with Ntropy specifically to enrich and standardize bank transaction data so their ML models could actually interpret what merchants were spending money on. Spending at Amazon versus spending at a restaurant means two very different things to an underwriter.

Accounting data adds structure and context that bank statements alone can't provide. A profit and loss statement shows margins. A balance sheet shows liabilities. Accounts receivable data reveals whether customers pay on time or 90 days late. Accounts payable data shows whether a business is under pressure from creditors. This is why the lending industry has moved toward standardizing accounting data alongside banking and commerce sources through unified APIs. Lenders who rely on bank statements alone miss critical signals. A business might show healthy bank balances while carrying mounting trade payables that signal distress. Or a business might look cash-poor while sitting on $500K in outstanding invoices from creditworthy customers.

Commerce data completes the picture. Platforms like Shopify and Amazon Seller Central know daily sales volumes, refund rates, customer acquisition trends, and seasonal patterns. Shopify Capital uses machine learning to analyze exactly these signals, including sales history, disputes, and customer engagement, to generate pre-approved offers for merchants without them even applying. The AI makes the first pass. A human reviews before funds move. Repayment happens automatically as a percentage of daily sales.

How revenue financing platforms onboard merchants

Across nearly every revenue based financing platform that has scaled, the onboarding flow follows the same structure. The merchant connects their commerce platform, then their bank accounts via open banking or Plaid, then their accounting software. The more data sources a merchant connects, the faster the decision and the better the terms.

Paperstack, which picked up former Clearco customers, underwrites ecommerce loans based on ecommerce, accounting, and financial data. Their team reviews connected data and presents funding offers within 24 to 48 hours, with fees ranging from 4% to 12% depending on repayment history and risk profile. Uncapped follows a similar model in Europe, connecting to commerce, payment, accounting, and advertising platforms to build a composite view of business health.

Swoop takes a different approach as a funding marketplace rather than a direct lender. Operating across the UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa with over 200,000 clients and 1,000+ funding providers, Swoop matches businesses to the right financing option using data from their bank accounts and accounting systems. They use open banking for transaction data and connect to accounting platforms like Sage through Apideck's unified Accounting API. That Sage integration became a global co-marketing partnership, giving Swoop distribution into Sage's customer base across multiple markets. Swoop's COO Ciaran Burke has said that access to richer data from bank accounts and accounting platforms allows for better lending decisions and faster capital.

Fundwell, which connects businesses with over 60 funding partners across more than 50 industries, has automated its document analysis and risk profiling to the point where underwriting workload dropped by 30 hours per week, supporting a 76.6% increase in onboarded customers. The pattern is the same everywhere: connect the data, automate the assessment, compress the time to funding.

The speed advantage is real. According to a comparison published by Luca AI, approval speed correlates directly with data integration depth. Platforms with direct API access to commerce, payment, and accounting systems approve in hours. Those requiring manual financial statement uploads take weeks. Traditional banks take 6 to 12 weeks minimum. Fifty-seven percent of all SME credit applications in the UK are either abandoned because the process is too hard or ultimately rejected, according to Plaid's analysis of the UK market.

Embedded lending changes the integration model

The most interesting shift in SMB lending is happening inside platforms themselves. Instead of merchants going to a separate lender, the lending is embedded into the software they already use.

Parafin powers embedded capital programs for major marketplaces and vertical SaaS companies alike. Their underwriting engine runs on ML models trained on data from over 2 million small businesses. When a DoorDash restaurant gets a pre-approved capital offer inside the DoorDash app, Parafin is running the underwriting behind the scenes using the merchant's sales history on the platform. The merchant never fills out a loan application or submits a credit check. The financing appears inside the platform they already operate in. Parafin ranked 15th on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, which gives you a sense of how fast this model is growing.

Kanmon targets a similar opportunity but focuses specifically on vertical SaaS and marketplace platforms. Kanmon provides the embedded lending infrastructure (term loans, lines of credit, invoice financing, AP financing) so that platforms can offer capital to their SMB customers without becoming lenders themselves. Kanmon handles underwriting, compliance, and servicing behind the scenes. What's notable is that Kanmon explicitly states platforms don't need to offer embedded payments before offering embedded lending, though underwriting benefits from payment data when it's available. The company analyzes financial information and business history to tailor risk assessments per product type, with most customers funded within one to two days. You can find Kanmon alongside other embedded lending providers in the Open Banking Tracker's embedded finance directory.

Stripe Capital works the same way for businesses processing payments through Stripe. Eligibility requires at least 90 days on the platform and $1,000 in average monthly sales. Transaction history and dispute rate determine the offer. Squarespace launched embedded lending powered by Stripe Capital in January 2025 and surpassed its entire annual goals within a single quarter, according to Corey Zettler, Director of Product for Financial Solutions at Squarespace.

Shopify takes it furthest. Capital flex, launched in November 2025, gives qualifying merchants continuous access to funds with a credit limit that adjusts based on real-time business metrics. There is no application and no fixed loan term. It is a rolling line of credit powered by the data Shopify already collects from running the merchant's entire commerce operation.

What this means for vertical SaaS and embedded finance builders

The pattern here is clear, and it has direct implications for anyone building lending products, vertical SaaS platforms, or embedded finance features.

Single-source underwriting is dying. Banking data alone misses accounting context. Accounting data alone can be stale or manipulated. Commerce data alone lacks the full financial picture. The winning models combine all three through a single integration layer. When open banking data is paired with real-time accounting data, lenders can cross-reference actual financials with what was submitted in the application, catching fraud and improving accuracy simultaneously. This is why unified APIs that connect accounting, banking, and commerce data in a single integration have become critical infrastructure for lending platforms.

That makes the integration layer the real moat. The lenders winning in this market are not the ones with the most capital. They are the ones with the deepest integrations into the systems where business data lives. Shopify can underwrite better than any bank because it sees every transaction, every refund, every customer dispute. Parafin can extend offers across dozens of platforms because it built configurable underwriting infrastructure that can run inside a partner's environment without the partner even sharing raw merchant data with Parafin's servers.

Float Financial in Canada shows where this is heading for vertical SaaS. Float started as a spend management platform with corporate cards and expense software. It now serves over 6,000 Canadian businesses, raised a $100 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank in January 2026, and launched Float Charge, a short-term working capital product. Float's visibility into real-time spending data and accounting integrations (NetSuite, Xero) positions it to underwrite working capital loans using data it already collects from running its customers' daily financial operations. Sacra's analysis notes that this positions Float for the $40 billion Canadian SMB lending market. That trajectory, from software platform to embedded lender, is one that any vertical SaaS company with transaction data could follow.

The opportunity for vertical SaaS companies follows directly from this. If your platform processes payments, manages inventory, or handles accounting for your customers, you are sitting on the data that lenders need. The embedded lending model, powered by infrastructure providers like Parafin or Kanmon, or built with unified APIs for accounting data, turns that data into a revenue stream and a retention tool simultaneously.

The $901 million revenue based financing market from 2019 was projected to reach $42.3 billion by 2027. Looking at the origination volumes from Shopify, Wayflyer, and Parafin alone, that projection looks conservative. The platforms that control the data layer, connecting banking, accounting, and commerce in a single onboarding flow, are the ones writing the checks.