Launching the Embedded Finance Index 2026

Apideck builds the integrations that fintech and vertical SaaS companies use to reach their customers' financial data in accounting platforms, ERPs and payroll systems. Our customers underwrite loans, reconcile payments and run spend management on that data. Behind all of it sits one question: which systems does a company's money actually run on, and how much of that can anyone see from outside?

Today we're launching the Embedded Finance Index 2026 to answer it. The index maps the stacks of 6,000+ companies in 106 countries using only what those companies disclose publicly: subprocessor lists, regulatory footers, vendor interviews, trust pages, filings, company announcements and around 517 indexed press articles. Every disclosed relationship carries the source it was read from. The result covers 1,297 providers across 12 layers of the stack, from payments to identity verification, and shows how much of that stack is still invisible.

Embedded finance is where platforms make their money

Public filings show why software companies keep adding financial products:

• Toast reported $5.04 billion in fintech revenue out of $6.15 billion total in FY2025, up from $4.05 billion of $4.96 billion in FY2024.

• Shopify Capital originated $4.2 billion in 2025, $1.2 billion more than the year before.

• ServiceTitan reported gross dollar retention above 95% through fiscal 2025 and 2026.

In October 2024, BCG and Adyen estimated the B2B SaaS embedded payments opportunity at $185 billion, with less than a fifth captured.

Toast sells software to restaurants and makes five of every six dollars from moving their money. About one in five companies in this dataset is on that same path, and every one of them needs live data out of the accounting system and the ERP their customer already runs.

Gertjan De Wilde, CEO and co-founder, Apideck

The dataset bears that out. Vertical SaaS platforms, meaning restaurant, healthcare, salon and construction software embedding payments, banking or lending, account for 1,229 companies, or 20.2% of the index. Consumer neobanks, where the embedded finance story started, account for 598, less than half that number.

The riskiest layers are the least disclosed

Payments is the most transparent part of the stack: 45.1% of companies in the index publicly name at least one payments provider. Disclosure then drops at every step toward risk.

965 companies name their sponsor bank. Only 345 name a KYC or identity vendor, and just 80 name a fraud vendor. The gap is regulatory. In the US, disclosure norms such as Member FDIC signage and BSA/AML attestations push sponsor bank relationships into the open, while naming an identity or fraud vendor carries no equivalent duty. From outside, nobody can see who verifies identity at the companies holding consumer money.

Even the layers companies do talk about often hide the provider. When companies mention lending, 44.0% describe an own-brand product without naming the infrastructure underneath. For BaaS the figure is 37.1%, and for payments 32.4%. Sponsor banking and identity are masked least, because those disclosures are made to satisfy a regulator rather than to market a product.

The index records six named infrastructure failures since 2023. All six happened in the layers the public can't inspect: pooled account structures, anti-money-laundering controls and partner oversight. The largest was Synapse, which filed for Chapter 11 in 2024 while serving around 100 fintechs and four partner banks. More than 100,000 customers were locked out of their money, and the trustee identified a shortfall of $65 million to $95 million. Evolve Bank & Trust received a cease-and-desist order from the Federal Reserve and Arkansas regulators on 14 June 2024, when its partners included Affirm and Stripe. Evolve is also the most-disclosed BaaS provider and the most-disclosed sponsor bank in the dataset.

A Member FDIC badge tells you the bank is insured. That didn't help anyone at Synapse. The banks stayed open and the ledger broke, and more than 100,000 people learned deposit insurance can't pay out to accounts nobody can reconstruct.

Gertjan De Wilde, CEO and co-founder, Apideck

Payments concentrate globally, banking stays national

Stripe is the most-disclosed payments provider. It is named by 595 companies, or 9.8% of the dataset, and is one of only two vendors above 5% concentration in any layer. It also appears in eight layers of the stack:

Stripe product	Companies disclosing it
Payments	595
Connect (platforms)	126
FX and payouts	55
Identity	31
Card issuing	29
Capital	27
Payroll	16
Treasury	14

These are disclosure counts, not market share. Companies are willing to say they use Stripe, which lifts its number, and Adyen's real share is likely higher than its count of 228.

Banking looks nothing like payments. Evolve, the most-disclosed BaaS provider, is named by only 64 companies (1.1%). The 965 disclosed sponsor bank relationships spread across 370 banks. The five largest hold 267 of them (28%), and the other 365 banks average fewer than two each.

The leading BaaS providers in the US, the UK and the EU don't overlap at all:

Region	Most-disclosed BaaS provider	Companies naming a sponsor bank
US	Sutton Bank	27%
UK	ClearBank	8%
EU	Swan	6%

The reason is licensing. Deposits and card programmes need a local licence or charter, and licences stop at borders, while payment and data APIs don't. A platform expanding across the Atlantic keeps its payments provider but rebuilds its banking layer from scratch.

The US never created an e-money licence, and that's the whole reason the sponsor bank exists. 27% of US companies name one. In the EU it's 6%, because a fintech there passports one EMI licence across 30 countries and has no bank to name.

Gertjan De Wilde, CEO and co-founder, Apideck

The line between bank and fintech is blurring

384 companies in the index (6.3%) now run their own banking, clearing or card issuing for at least one layer. In 2026, Mews became the first hospitality software platform to hold its own e-money licence, granted by De Nederlandsche Bank.

In the US, the route runs through bank charters. The index tracks 36 applications since the OCC reopened de novo chartering, from companies including Block, Revolut, Circle, Upstart and Morgan Stanley. Of these, 26 have conditional approval, 2 are approved, 2 were denied and 6 are still filed. Most are national trust banks rather than deposit-taking banks. Each charter that opens ends a sponsor bank relationship.

Traffic runs the other way too. JPMorgan Chase names third-party providers in nine of the twelve layers the index tracks, more than any fintech analyzed, while selling payments and treasury infrastructure to platforms through JPMorgan Payments. Itaú Unibanco names providers in eight layers and has conditional OCC approval for a US national bank charter, the same route a fintech takes to stop renting a sponsor bank.

Financial data beyond the bank account

QuickBooks is the most-cited connector anywhere in the dataset, named by 745 companies (12.2%). That puts it ahead of Plaid, the most-cited open banking aggregator, at 248 (4.1%). Money moves on accounting ledgers, payroll runs and ERP records as much as on bank data.

More than 700 companies in this dataset built their own connection into their customers' QuickBooks, because a bank feed shows money moving and the ledger tells you why. That's the data you underwrite a small business on, and Section 1033 doesn't cover it.

Gertjan De Wilde, CEO and co-founder, Apideck

The index expects financial data connectivity to be the most reshuffled leaderboard, even with the US Section 1033 rule under reconsideration and the EU's FIDA framework stalled since June 2025. AI agents are starting to consume the same layer: the dataset already tracks eight production agent surfaces, including Stripe's agent toolkit and Adyen's MCP server.

How to use the index

For fintechs and software platforms, the index is a research tool. Company profiles cover:

• Founding story and funding

• Regulatory licences

• Product timeline

• Disclosed stack

With these profiles you can see what a competitor runs on before you choose a provider. You can also check a prospective bank partner against the index's record of enforcement actions.

For providers, the public ranking is only part of the picture. Every vendor has a profile at embeddedfinanceindex.com Listed vendors can claim theirs to see what the public version doesn't show:

• Their rank within their category

• How they compare with direct competitors

• Where their feature coverage is ahead or behind

• Which gaps are worth closing

In a crowded category like BaaS, the ranking shows whether you sit near the top or in the long tail. The dataset refreshes during the year. Submitted corrections are reviewed within five business days.

The index makes two forecasts for 2027. The first is that KYC disclosure stays under 10% and the gap with sponsor banks widens, as more fintechs treat their identity and fraud stack as a competitive advantage. The second is that embedded crypto, at 3.8% of companies today, reaches 10% or more. If the first holds, the layers where the last six failures happened will stay the hardest to see from outside.

The index shows what embedded finance runs on. For how to build it, our State of B2B Embedded Finance 2026 report covers market sizing, build-vs-buy frameworks, the vendor landscape and risk.

The Embedded Finance Index 2026 is live at embeddedfinanceindex.com