The Quiet Revolution: Why Finance Is Disappearing Into Everyday Life

The Rise of Invisible Banking

Once upon a time, fintech was about carving banking into neat little pieces—one app for payments, another for lending, another for wealth management. Today, that playbook has flipped. Instead of dozens of niche apps, we’re watching them collapse into platforms that make finance feel almost invisible.

Think about it. Your rideshare app pays you instantly. Shopify doesn’t just host your store—it holds your checking account. Even yoga studios can offer payment plans for memberships. These aren’t just add-ons; they’re signals that finance itself is becoming a background layer in everyday commerce.

The Numbers Behind the Buzz

This isn’t a small shift. In 2024, embedded finance was a $112 billion market. By the next decade, depending on who you believe, it could be worth anywhere between $571 billion and $1.7 trillion. Even the cautious forecasts suggest double-digit annual growth.

But what matters more than the numbers is the direction. HSBC’s Dan Allred put it best: “All companies are now becoming fintechs.” When financial services stop looking like banks and start looking like features, you know the ground is moving beneath your feet.

Platforms at War

If this feels familiar, it should. The 2010s gave us the smartphone wars. The 2020s are shaping up to be the platform wars—except now the prize isn’t your screen time, it’s your wallet. Stripe started as a clean way to process payments. Today, it’s effectively an operating system for online money, handling loans, cards, and even full-scale banking through its APIs. Square went from card readers to full-service business management. PayPal added crypto and buy-now-pay-later. Even Amazon and Uber couldn’t resist, building financial services into their ecosystems. The reason is simple: once you have a customer inside your platform, it’s far cheaper to sell them new financial services than to go find another customer from scratch. That’s why finance is becoming the ultimate retention strategy.

APIs: The New Plumbing

Behind every sleek interface sits a messy web of partnerships, regulations, and APIs. The $18.6 billion Banking-as-a-Service industry is the hidden engine of this transformation. Platforms like Shopify don’t actually become banks. They partner with players like Stripe, which in turn hooks into licensed institutions such as Goldman Sachs. Open banking is adding fuel. In 2023, open banking transactions hit $57 billion worldwide. And with new rules coming in 2026 requiring standardized data sharing, the flow of financial information will only accelerate.

Finance, once heavy with paperwork and delays, is now as programmable as email.

Why This Matters for Business

The U.S. embedded finance market alone is on track to grow from $22 billion in 2021 to $51 billion in 2026. Most of that will come from payments—consumer transactions doubling, and B2B payments nearly quadrupling. That’s not just growth; it’s a rewiring of the economy’s circulatory system. And the companies making it work prove how powerful this shift can be. Shopify’s merchants can now manage banking and lending without leaving their dashboard. Toast, a restaurant platform, makes more than 80% of its revenue from financial services. Mindbody, which caters to gyms and spas, earns more than half its income from embedded products. For these firms, finance isn’t a side hustle. It’s the business.

Not Without Risk

Of course, revolutions are messy. In April 2024, Synapse—a major Banking-as-a-Service provider—collapsed, freezing as much as $160 million in customer funds. It exposed just how fragile the middle layer of embedded finance can be, where fintechs operate in regulatory gray zones and record-keeping isn’t always tight.

The shock was enough to get regulators moving. FDIC enforcement actions surged, state agencies rolled out stricter compliance requirements, and platforms suddenly realized that “move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the thing you might break is someone’s money.

What Comes Next

The future of embedded finance won’t be about who can tack on the most products. It will be about who can do it responsibly—and seamlessly. AI is already reshaping how risk is assessed, while real-time payment networks like FedNow are making slow settlements a thing of the past. Global variations are also emerging. Europe is opening payment rails to non-banks. Singapore is licensing digital banks with clear rules of engagement. And Asia-Pacific, with its smartphone-first economies, is becoming fertile ground for embedded finance adoption. Vertical platforms—those built for specific industries—are especially well-positioned. An agriculture app that offers seasonal crop financing, or a logistics platform that factors freight payments, can design products banks never thought to build. Their strength is knowing their users’ pain points better than anyone else.

The Convergence Is Just Beginning

For now, only about 3% of global banking and insurance revenues have been touched by fintech. That means the story is just getting started. The winners will be those who integrate smoothly, manage risk with care, and wield data intelligently. The stakes are enormous. Embedded finance isn’t just a business opportunity—it’s a contest over who will control the infrastructure of digital commerce. In this new world, finance won’t feel like a separate industry. It will be the invisible fabric holding everything together.

Sources for images: Precedence Research; HSBC 2025 Fintech Report; Bain & Company
Sources for research: HSBC Innovation Banking; Bain & Company; A16Z; Harvard University; CFPB
Additional references: Industry reporting on Synapse bankruptcy