Pay360: Equals Money Powers Innovation with BaaS
In an exclusive interview with FinTech Magazine, Malcolm Maclean, Director of Solutions Engineering at Equals Money, discusses how the company's embedded finance solutions are helping businesses navigate regulatory challenges while accelerating their time-to-market.
Rapid Deployment of Financial Services
Equals Money has positioned itself as a key player in the embedded finance space by offering a flexible, white-label platform that allows businesses to quickly implement financial services.
"We offer a wide labelable product on the B2B payments and card side. We make these available to third parties to directly connect into payment rails and card issuing capability via API," explains Malcolm.
"We can also give them the same UIs that we offer to our own direct customers on their own instance and their own white label."
This approach enables businesses to launch financial products with remarkable speed. "They come to us saying, 'We've got this idea, we've got this niche. We want to get it to market in a couple of weeks.'
"If we give them their entire business from a technology platform perspective in a couple of weeks, they can trial it out on the market," Malcolm notes.
The platform's flexibility also supports a gradual approach to integration. "If that goes very well, we often see them then automate and integrate on the API side off the back of it," he adds.
“It's less about Banking-as-a-Service and more about our dedication and experience working with these businesses to understand their industry types and the flows they're working with”
Serving High-Risk Sectors
While Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions provide technical capabilities, Equals Money's approach to working with traditionally underserved sectors sets them apart.
"It's more about allowing businesses that don't necessarily have the licenses or the regulation to offer financial services to be able to integrate these into their own products," Malcolm explains. "There's a massive use case for that."
What differentiates Equals Money is not a different risk appetite but rather their specialised approach to understanding industry-specific needs.
“It's less about Banking-as-a-Service and more about our dedication and experience working with these businesses to understand their industry types and the flows they're working with,” says Malcolm.
He clarifies a common misconception: “It's not so much that we have a different risk appetite to banks themselves. Everybody will be working with tier one incumbent banks from a safeguarding perspective.
“The risk appetite is actually the same across those banks and us, but we have the capacity and appetite to dedicate resources to onboarding these different sectors and really understand the specific challenges they're facing.”
“The newer payment-as-a-service offering in our product suite has exploded and that's probably the business area that excites me the most"
European Expansion and New Opportunities
Equals Money has recently expanded its footprint beyond the UK, creating new opportunities for its embedded finance offerings.
"Recently we expanded into Europe. We acquired a business which gave us a license out of Belgium that allowed us to offer the entire product suite, which we traditionally had offered in the UK, across the whole of Europe," Malcolm reveals.
This expansion coincides with significant growth in their newer product offerings.
“The newer payment-as-a-service offering in our product suite has exploded and that's probably the business area that excites me the most.
“I'm now seeing use cases I'd never even thought about before, with brands I grew up with that I never imagined would need embedded financial solutions. They're now coming to us with problems to solve. That whole area excites me tremendously.”
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