Get Started: how can fintechs boost adoption of their products to drive revenue?

mmob's Founder and CEO, Irfan Khan, recently appeared on the Get Started podcast by SkyParlour PR. Through an insightful interview with Kimberley Waldron, he shared mmob’s origin story and how his experience of frustrations on the enterprise and startup sides led to founding a business that marries the two together.

mmob is an embedded finance business that provides a technology toolkit enabling API-first solutions to be embedded into apps and websites at speed. Examples of services range from credit products and insurance to open banking payments, which can be used in digital marketplaces, banking apps and more.

“Our proprietary technology we’ve been building over the past four years allows us to do the API orchestration and UI/UX to create that service fully natively to be deployed into any digital channel, anywhere in the world… so your clients can access this in as little as two hours.”

mmob focuses on increasing interoperability for innovative providers with new, exciting products, and distribution channels that have large existing user bases – and most importantly trust, which Khan says is the only way forward for fintechs to grow. Offering their services through a B2B2C model is something many fintechs have come round to over the past couple of years – and it solves pain points on both sides of the FinTech-Bank ecosystem – but the practicalities remain a challenge in 2024.

“There are three factors when delivering anything: time, cost and quality,” says Khan. “By delivering through embedded technology you can address the time and cost, while the quality stays the same. If you can reduce time to market and cost… you can start to rapidly get those services out there, test them quickly – and we can see if there’s adoption.”

The benefit of offering an embedded service – particularly through mmob’s solution – is that rather than building a product over a year which users may not end up taking to, platforms can rapidly deploy new products and understand their viability. Additionally, the providers of these products – whether they’re offering lending, insurance, a new lifestyle solution or something else – can quickly deploy into new channels and understand where best to reach their ideal customer.

When it comes to innovators looking to improve services for their customers, Khan says they “will want to access products and services really quickly, take it out to market and see whether there’s adoption. If there’s not adoption, they can iterate and adapt their proposition”. In this way, organisations of all sizes can operate an agile model of continuous improvement. This iteration is no longer the preserve of tech startups, who currently end up falling at the final hurdle when an enterprise gets involved.

Easier adoption will clarify the path forward for fintechs in a tough market

For fintechs, moving the focus from continuously innovating your own products and surviving until the next funding round, to a clearer goal of increased adoption and faster revenue generation, will be key in the “new normal” economy where funding rounds take longer and more proof points are needed. Innovators must understand the necessity of this and get to grips with the challenges involved.

“There’s a school of thought generally across the product and engineering community in fintech, that if they’re API first and they’ve created their product with super API documentation on their dev portals, customers will come and adopt,” says Khan. “That concept just doesn’t exist.”

 Moreover, the market is being saturated by a number of services in the areas of BaaS, payments, lending and increasingly insurance. “The reality is, more and more products out there are being created every day that you’re competing with. The time and attention you need for someone else to try and implement it, even if it’s a few days or weeks, just doesn’t exist. So if you want to make your service proposition really front of mind, you have to make it highly consumable.”

The concept of services that can be embedded into an existing user experience through API is gaining huge traction, but the key will be enabling people to test and use these products with as little time and cost commitment as possible. As these pre-built services take off, Khan says companies will begin to modularise them to enable hyper personalisation at speed. “You can download it, play with it, and then decide whether you truly want to integrate with it – that’s what embedded finance is.”

mmob's solution seeks not just to solve immediate technical pain points for both fintechs and banks – but to equip them for a new era of financial services

mmob is starting to work with more and more clients who realise interoperability and ease of adoption must be addressed sooner rather than later. “They’ve already had a cycle where they’ve gone through maybe 24 months trying to take their API-first strategy to market, and realised a number of client personas don’t want to build the service – but they will be able to take mmob’s embeddable product, try it out, and start adopting it.”

This enablement of “true” embedded finance has been a long time coming, with the term often used to describe nothing more than a partnership between two providers. Enabling a fully native embedded finance journey – especially one that can be lifted and placed as easily as mmob allows – will become more and more popular among fintechs that need to make their product as easy to adopt as possible.

It will also be led by the ever-accelerating demands and expectations of the consumer. “In the next 10-15 years, financial services will be truly interoperable,” says Khan. “They will be accessible through channels you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of. You won’t need to go to a bank – or even “be banked” – to make financial transactions or financial decisions… We see the fluidity of e-wallets and how financial services are being adopted into ecommerce and lifestyle applications and channels.

“As we evolve, we’ll see you can access financial products and services through an application of your choice that you have a strong relationship with.” The most important factor, he adds, will be strong data stewardship. “If there is a trustworthy entity that has that, they will probably own your relationship with managing your finances [and] your data… all of that is going to stem from embedded finance.”

Can embedded finance be the key to driving adoption for the fintech market? Get in touch with us to share your views and find out how we are driving these solutions forward.

You can listen to Irfan Khan on the Get Started podcast here.