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Embedded finance is the practice of putting bank accounts, payments, cards, credit, and settlement rails inside a software product the user was already using for something else. A vertical SaaS gives its restaurants a payout account. A marketplace issues a card to its drivers. A treasury tool sweeps balances across chains without asking the user to touch a wallet. The category is now large enough that Bain & Company and Bain Capital project revenue for platforms and infrastructure providers will more than double from $21 billion in 2021 to $51 billion in 2026, on transaction value of roughly $7 trillion in the US alone (Bain). This piece maps ten embedded finance companies you should know in 2026 and how their offers actually differ.

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Short answer: Stripe, Marqeta, Adyen, Unit, Synctera, Rapyd, Highnote, Treasury Prime, SoFi Tech Solutions (the former Galileo), and Eco. Each sits in a different slot of the stack: card acquiring and issuing, sponsor-bank banking-as-a-service, card processing, global payouts, and stablecoin rails. Pick by what job you are hiring the vendor to do, not by brand recognition.

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Short answer: Every embedded finance company slots into one of four buckets. Banking-as-a-service (Unit, Synctera, Treasury Prime) wires a sponsor bank behind an API so platforms can open accounts and move ACH. Payments-as-a-service (Stripe, Adyen, Rapyd) handles acceptance, splits, and payouts across cards and local rails. Issuing-as-a-service (Marqeta, Highnote, SoFi Tech Solutions) creates virtual and physical cards on your brand. Stablecoin-rail-as-a-service (Eco) settles value across chains without card networks or ACH. Most real programs stitch two or three of these together.

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Category: payments-as-a-service, with issuing.
​ Positioning: the default embedded payments layer for platforms and marketplaces.

Stripe Connect handles onboarding, KYC, tokenization, sanctions checks, and payouts for software platforms and marketplaces, and is what Shopify, DoorDash, Lyft, Instacart, and GitHub use to move money to their sellers, drivers, and creators (Stripe Connect). Connect exposes prebuilt UI components for onboarding and dashboards so platforms can go live without building payment facilitation from scratch. On top of Connect, Stripe Issuing lets a platform create physical and virtual spending cards for its users under a single API. Best for: SaaS platforms and marketplaces that want one vendor covering acceptance, payouts, and cards, without buying multiple contracts.

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Category: issuing-as-a-service.
​ Positioning: the modern card issuing and processing platform.

Marqeta provides an open API for card issuing and real-time transaction processing, with Just-in-Time (JIT) funding and dynamic spend controls that let programs approve or decline authorizations based on live business logic (Marqeta). Marqeta itself is not a bank; the platform provides technology on top of bank partners, and the exact set of supported products varies by jurisdiction. Best for: fintechs and enterprises building custom card programs where authorization logic and program design matter more than a packaged experience.

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Category: payments-as-a-service with licensed banking infrastructure.
​ Positioning: full-stack embedded finance under one licensed platform.

Adyen's embedded finance suite lets a software platform white-label payments, accounts, card issuing, and capital under its own brand, running on Adyen's own licensed banking infrastructure so platforms avoid stitching together third-party banking, card, and lending contracts (Adyen). The pitch is a single integration for global coverage where Adyen handles onboarding, compliance, KYC, and fraud. Named customer wins for embedded capital include Fresha and Vagaro, both cited on the product page as launching Capital on Adyen to solve merchant cash flow. Best for: platforms operating internationally that want one licensed counterparty for the whole finance surface.

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Category: banking-as-a-service.
​ Positioning: financial infrastructure for US software platforms.

Unit lets platforms embed accounts and wallets, ACH and wire money movement, card issuing, and working capital, all through composable APIs backed by partner banks. The company reports more than $100 billion in annualized transaction volume, over 2 million users, and 11 million daily API calls on its homepage (Unit), and it recently crossed the $100 billion annual transaction volume milestone (Unit blog). Customer logos include Roofstock, Relay, HoneyBook, Highbeam, and Wix. Unit itself is a financial technology company, not a bank; banking services come from its FDIC-member bank partners. Best for: US-focused SaaS platforms that want a fully managed BaaS option (Ready-to-Launch) or a custom build on the same infrastructure.

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Category: banking-as-a-service.
​ Positioning: sponsor-bank matching and shared oversight tooling.

Synctera's platform pairs fintechs with sponsor banks in its network and gives both sides one console for program data, reconciliation, cases, and compliance workflows, with product surface covering bank accounts, card programs, and money movement (Synctera). In 2025 Synctera acquired Cable, a compliance oversight startup, and integrated its tooling into the platform (Synctera). Named customers include BTG Pactual and Fruitful. Best for: fintechs and community or regional banks that want a shared control plane so the sponsor bank can supervise the program in real time.

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Category: payments-as-a-service.
​ Positioning: global acceptance, payouts, and multi-currency accounts.

Rapyd's platform covers direct card acquiring, multi-currency business accounts, payouts, and card issuing, with named enterprise references including Uber, Adidas, Microsoft, Booking, Google, and Meta on the homepage (Rapyd). The product surface leans into cross-border money movement, local payment methods, and stablecoin payouts. Best for: platforms with real cross-border exposure where local payment method coverage and payouts, not just US card acceptance, drive the business case.

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Category: unified issuing, acquiring, and ledger.
​ Positioning: one platform for issuing, acquiring, credit, and real-time ledgering.

Highnote combines issuing, acquiring, credit, money movement, and real-time ledgering under a single GraphQL API, with money movement rails spanning ACH, wire, RTP and FedNow, OCT and AFT, and stablecoin (Highnote). Customer logos on the homepage include Lowe's, BNY, Splitit, Samsung, SpotOn, and Coinflow. The Embedded Finance solution page pitches this stack at platforms and marketplaces that want to launch card, credit, and money-movement products without gluing together three vendors (Highnote Embedded Finance). Best for: teams that want issuing and acquiring on the same ledger so reconciliation, spend controls, and card economics live in one system.

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Category: bank-direct embedded banking.
​ Positioning: the bank operating system for embedded banking.

Treasury Prime's model is bank-direct: the platform sits between a fintech and one of its network banks, but the fintech signs and manages the relationship with the bank rather than the tech vendor acting as a program manager (Treasury Prime). The homepage lists KeyBank, Grasshopper Bank, LendingClub, Bangor Savings Bank, and OMB Bank among its bank partners, and reports $10 billion in new deposits, 2.5 million new active accounts, and $90 billion in transactions across partner institutions. Treasury Prime also runs a partner marketplace that plugs in KYC, compliance monitoring, and account funding vendors alongside the core banking APIs. Best for: fintechs and banks that want the fintech to hold the bank contract directly for regulatory and deposit-economics reasons.

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Category: card processing and digital banking.
​ Positioning: the incumbent processor rebranded under SoFi.

Galileo Financial Technologies rebranded to SoFi Tech Solutions in 2025 and continues to power banks, fintechs, and brands with card issuing, payment processing, and embedded finance capabilities under the broader SoFi platform (SoFi). Its homepage reports 135 million accounts on the platform, 100+ platform partners, and 13 supported countries, and the company was named Best-in-Class for digital issuance in Javelin Strategy & Research's 2025 Digital Issuance Provider Scorecard (SoFi Tech Solutions). Best for: programs at scale that need a large processor with a long operating history and the ability to work with SoFi's broader deposit and lending balance sheet.

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Category: stablecoin rail (orchestration).
​ Positioning: programmable routing and orchestration for stablecoins across chains.

Every other company on this list moves money over card networks, ACH, wire, and RTP. Eco moves stablecoins across blockchains. Eco Routes is an intent-based product for real-time stablecoin transfers and swaps across chains: a user signs the outcome they want, solvers compete to fulfill it, and a source-chain vault releases the reward only on cryptographic proof of fulfillment (Eco docs). Routes supports multiple prover options including CCTP, Hyperlane, LayerZero, Chainlink CCIP, and Polymer, and it implements the ERC-7683 cross-chain order interface. On top of Routes, Eco is building unified stablecoin balances and a shared crowd-liquidity protocol for chains and bridges (Eco). Best for: platforms whose money movement is already partly onchain (treasury, cross-border settlement, tokenization, FX) and that want stablecoin flows to feel as programmable as a card transaction.

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APIs and workflows that let a non-financial software product offer bank accounts, payments, cards, credit, or settlement to its users, under the software's brand. The vendor holds the regulatory infrastructure, the bank relationships, or the network connectivity so the platform does not have to.

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Bond was acquired by FIS in June 2023 and folded into FIS's broader offering, so it is no longer an independent vendor to evaluate against the rest of this list (Payments Dive). Solid Financial Technologies filed Chapter 11 in April 2025 and confirmed a Subchapter V liquidation plan later that year, so it is not a going concern (elevenflo). Both are frequently listed in outdated roundups.

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Banking-as-a-service exposes a sponsor bank's balance sheet: accounts, ACH, wires, sometimes savings. Issuing-as-a-service exposes card networks: authorization logic, virtual and physical cards, spend controls. Some vendors (Unit, Adyen, Highnote) cover both under one API; Marqeta and SoFi Tech Solutions lean heavily on the issuing side.

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Card and ACH rails are the right answer when the counterparty is a US bank account or a Visa or Mastercard credential. Stablecoin rails are the right answer when value moves between chains, between exchanges, or across borders in a currency the local banking rails do not clear cheaply. Programs building both often use card and ACH rails at the customer edge and a stablecoin rail underneath for treasury and settlement.

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Start from the job. If the job is "accept cards and split payouts to sellers", Stripe or Adyen is the shortest path. If the job is "open FDIC-insured accounts and move ACH in the US", Unit, Synctera, or Treasury Prime. If the job is "issue custom cards with authorization logic", Marqeta, Highnote, or SoFi Tech Solutions. If the job is "settle across chains and stablecoins", Eco. Most serious programs eventually run more than one of these.

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Every vendor description in this piece was verified against the company's own website or docs on 2026-08-13. Bond and Solid were dropped because both are no longer independent going concerns (see the FAQ). Market sizing figures come from Bain & Company and Bain Capital's 2022 embedded finance report (Bain). Customer names and usage stats are quoted from each vendor's own homepage or product page and were not independently audited.

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International payment gateway explained walks through vendor pricing and a worked example.
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