Embedded B2B Finance - When Software Becomes The Bank

For most of modern financial history, the bank was the destination. Customers went to it for credit, accounts, and payments — and the bank, in return, owned the relationship. That architecture is now quietly being dismantled. Not by a new generation of banks, but by software companies that never set out to be banks at all.

Shopify has deployed over $5 billion in merchant financing. Stripe underwrites loans from payment data. Square extends credit to sellers no traditional lender would touch. Klarna obtained a full Swedish banking license in 2023. In each case, a software platform has inserted itself between the SME and the financial system — and discovered that the customer relationship, the underwriting data, and the distribution economics are now theirs to keep.

Our report, Embedded B2B Finance: When Software Becomes the Bank, examines the structural shift behind these moves. We map the four forces that made it possible — API maturity, data abundance, the $5 trillion global SME financing gap, and platform-scale distribution — and break down how value is being redistributed across a new four-layer stack: SMEs, platforms, BaaS infrastructure providers, and the banks that still hold the regulatory licenses. We dissect the underwriting models behind Shopify Capital, Stripe Capital, and Square Loans, and we examine the systemic risks accumulating in the gaps between regulatory perimeters: the Synapse collapse of 2024, procyclical shadow credit, and the concentration of behavioral financial data in the hands of a few platforms.

This is not a story about fintech disruption. It is a story about where economic value migrates when distribution, data, and underwriting collapse into a single layer of software. Platforms have won the customer interface. Banks still own the infrastructure. The question is what happens to that equilibrium when regulation catches up — and whether the biggest long-term winner is neither the platform nor the bank, but the BaaS middleware layer that quietly powers both.

This is why the Bocconi Students Fintech Society has made embedded B2B finance the focus of this report: because the next decade of financial intermediation will not be defined by who issues the credit, but by who owns the interface where the credit is requested.

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Published in June 2026

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Project Team

Project Leader: Nupur Gupta

Junior Analysts: Mercedes Dominguez, Diana Kalantar, Livia Pollini

Association Board :

Neil Maaouni (President & Head of Data Analysis), Mathilde Castagine (Vice President & Head of Events), Guillaume Abaz (Senior Advisor to the board), Andrea Botero (Head of M&A and VC), Antonina Bojanowska (Head of Generalist), Noé Wierzba (Head of Operations), Lucas Médina (Head of Corporate Analysis) , Alexandra Minca (Head of Communication)