Poor support at embedded finance providers hurts growth

Research published by Equals and Visa Consulting & Analytics found that service shortfalls by embedded finance providers are hurting business growth. The study surveyed more than 150 senior decision-makers across the UK and Western Europe.

The findings point to lost revenue, delayed expansion, and operational strain for companies that use embedded finance and payments services. Among chief financial officers, 60% said they had lost revenue because of poor provider support, while more than two in five businesses said service issues had delayed international expansion.

Embedded finance is widely expected to become a large market in Europe, with McKinsey estimating it could exceed €100 billion by the end of the decade. Against that backdrop, the research suggests execution and support problems are emerging as a brake on adoption and scale.

Respondents drew a clear link between provider support and commercial outcomes. Overall, 82% said providers play a critical role in helping them successfully scale embedded finance, and 71% said internal teams alone cannot manage the operational and regulatory complexity involved.

That pressure was even more pronounced among finance chiefs. Four in five chief financial officers (81%) said their internal teams could not manage the operational and regulatory demands of embedded finance on their own.

Service strain

The research found that 45% of respondents said service and support issues had limited their ability to realise business benefits. More than half (54%) said servicing challenges were a constant operational burden rather than occasional incidents.

Qualitative responses suggested problems often begin during onboarding. Buyers said providers performed well during the sales process but later fell short due to integration delays, slow resolution of technical issues, and compliance gaps that should have been identified earlier.

The results also point to a mismatch in how companies choose providers. Buyers do not consistently rank service as a top factor in partner selection, even though they later link it directly to revenue growth, trust and expansion into new markets.

Scale concerns

Many respondents said they felt caught between large providers seen as inattentive and smaller groups that lacked operational depth. More than 60% of chief financial officers said providers were either too big to care or too small to deliver at scale.

The split was especially clear in responses about larger institutions. Some 63% of chief financial officers said providers were too large to care about their needs, a figure that rose to 76% among neobank respondents.

At the same time, 60% of chief financial officers said other providers were too small to meet operational and compliance requirements reliably at scale. The findings suggest buyers want both personal support and the capacity to handle growth across markets.

Human support

The study also found concern about the balance between automation and direct service. Sixty per cent of businesses said increasing automation or AI-driven servicing by providers risks reducing the human expertise and relationship support their organisations rely on.

Respondents said they wanted direct access to relationship managers and specialists rather than ticket-based support systems, where accountability can be harder to establish. That preference suggests service design is becoming part of the competitive equation in a sector often defined by product features and pricing.

The survey covered senior decision-makers, including chief financial officers, chief technology officers, heads of payments and finance directors. Participants came from banks, neobanks, fintechs, trading portals and digital asset exchanges across the UK and Western Europe, and 10 in-depth qualitative interviews supplemented the research.

Ed Chandler shared his view of the findings.

"These findings suggest that many businesses are underserved because their payment environments are too complex for off-the-rack solutions. At Equals, we recognise there is no one-size-fits-all model for successful embedded finance and payments adoption. Exceptional businesses need a unified, flexible platform that can be adapted to meet their needs, combined with a genuine partner that understands the complexity of their payment environment. This includes support through compliance challenges and the fragmentation that can occur during cross-border expansion," said Ed Chandler, senior executive leader at Equals.