Embedded Finance Finds Its Second Gear: Inclusion, Stablecoins and the Rails Rewriting Africa
As of this week, the beyond-banking story has stopped being a slide in a pitch deck and started looking like a working business. The numbers, the deals and the regulatory noise all point the same way.
For years, embedded finance has been the fintech equivalent of a gym membership in January: enthusiastically signed up for, less enthusiastically used. Platforms promised to tuck payments, credit and insurance into every retail flow, but most of the plumbing lived in slide decks rather than live production code. That is finally changing, and the past seven days have given us the clearest signal yet.
A fresh projection cited by Finextra and FinanceX Magazine pegs global embedded finance revenue at £617 billion by 2031, a 279% jump from current levels. Treat the exact figure with the usual market-sizing scepticism, but the direction of travel is now backed by shipping product, not just forecasts.
The Treezor Deal: Embedded Finance Grows an Adult
Earlier this month, European investing platform Shares completed its purchase of Treezor from Société Générale, closing a transaction that had been in the works since the summer. The acquisition hands Shares a 25-country regulatory passport, a card-issuing stack and a BaaS licence base previously used by neobanks across the continent. The combined group is targeting €100 million in revenue by 2027, according to transaction coverage from Finextra.
Africa's Second Fintech Wave Pushes Past Payments
While Europe refactors its BaaS stack, Africa is quietly re-engineering what financial inclusion means in 2026. The headline this fortnight came from The Fintech Times, which ran a 20-year retrospective on Safaricom's M-Pesa. The piece notes that M-Pesa processed more than USD 400 billion in annualised transaction value in its most recent fiscal year, serving over 60 million active monthly users across Kenya, Tanzania, the DRC and beyond.
Three recent African transactions sketch the shape of this second wave: Kuunda closed a USD 7.5 million pre-Series A backed by Nedbank and Accion Venture Lab; Anchor closed a USD 2.4 million seed led by Goat Capital; and Connect Money in Egypt completed an USD 8 million seed for a MENA card-issuing platform.
Sustainability Moves From Marketing to Markets
The green fintech corner of beyond-banking has, until recently, suffered from a credibility problem. The Singapore FinTech Festival Fintech Excellence Awards 2026 shortlist, published this week by Fintech Singapore, hints that this is shifting. Among the 24 finalists is Orbit, a platform that automates verification for Sustainability-Linked Loans and Green Bonds through API integrations into corporate systems. The European Banking Authority has published updated supervisory expectations on ESG risk management, pushing banks to show live monitoring rather than annual snapshots.
Stablecoins Keep Creeping Into Inclusion
In the last fortnight, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have each nudged their stablecoin settlement rails further into emerging markets, with pilots in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Business News This Week also covered how banking AI is pushing deeper into India's newest customer cohorts, often routing settlement across tokenised rails rather than legacy correspondent banking.
The Takeaway
Beyond banking is no longer a slogan. It is a procurement question, a credit question and a reporting question, often inside the same deal. The pilots have graduated. The invoices have started arriving.
