Banking-as-a-Service · Use case
Embed accounts in a vertical SaaS platform
Short answer
Accounts inside your software let customers get paid and pay where they already work. The BaaS provider supplies segregated accounts or virtual IBANs, business verification and safeguarding. The first question is structural: are your users direct customers of the licence holder, or does money flow through an account you control?
What this use case is
Invoicing, payroll, property management, hospitality or practice software adds a business account so money movement lives next to the workflow it belongs to.
Who builds this
What your customer sees
- 1Taps "Open business account"
- 2Completes business verification
- 3Receives an IBAN
- 4Invoices are paid straight into the account
- 5Pays suppliers or payroll from the platform
How Banking-as-a-Service solves it
Embedded onboarding in your product
Embedded onboarding in your product
Business verification of the company and its beneficial owners
Business verification of the company and its beneficial owners
An account or virtual IBAN per customer, under the licence holder
An account or virtual IBAN per customer, under the licence holder
Incoming payments matched to invoices using the virtual IBAN or reference
Incoming payments matched to invoices using the virtual IBAN or reference
Outgoing payments and bulk payouts initiated from your workflow
Outgoing payments and bulk payouts initiated from your workflow
Reconciliation data written back into your own data model
Reconciliation data written back into your own data model
Want to have
- KYB including beneficial owners
- Per-customer IBAN or virtual IBAN
- Remitter and reference data for reconciliation
- Bulk payments
- Webhooks
- Embeddable or API-first onboarding
- Multi-user access for your customers' teams
Optional
- Business cards
- FX
- Open banking
- Cash sweeps or interest
Design decisions
Account ownership
holding client funds in an account you control may itself require authorisation; direct customer relationships avoid that but add onboarding friction. [TO CONFIRM: legal analysis for your markets]
Onboarding experience
time to launch versus a seamless product
Monetisation
what your customers value versus what your provider allows
What to put in your RFP
Structure
- account ownership model
- virtual IBAN support
Onboarding
- KYB scope, beneficial owner checks, embeddable flows
Payments
- incoming matching data, bulk and scheduled payouts, rails
Data
- reconciliation fields, webhooks, reporting exports
Commercials
- per-account pricing at scale, revenue-share options
Exit
- data portability, customer migration
How to evaluate providers for this use case
- 1Reconciliation data quality
- 2KYB completion experience
- 3Risk appetite for your customers' industries
- 4Pricing per account as you scale
- 5Revenue-share terms
Pitfalls
- Holding customer funds without authorisation in a pooled model
- KYB friction killing adoption
- Reconciliation data that does not map to your invoices or payroll runs
- Discovering late that the provider excludes some of your customers' industries
What providers will ask you
- Customer industries and sizes
- Expected accounts and volumes
- Where accounts sit in your product
- Who handles support
Other Finlane categories that cover parts of this
This use case is solved mainly with Banking-as-a-Service. These categories cover specific parts of it and can be tendered alongside it.
Frequently asked questions
Questions for this use case are covered in the category guide.
See the full cross-category stack for this use case
Other Banking-as-a-Service use cases
Spin up a consumer or SMB banking product with named IBANs, deposits and everyday payments — without holding a banking licence yourself.
Add SEPA, Faster Payments or SWIFT railsRoute domestic and cross-border transfers on the schemes your customers actually use, with settlement and reconciliation handled by the provider.
Operate a marketplace payout flowHold buyer funds, split them between sellers, and pay out on schedule — with the compliance and safeguarding perimeter owned by the BaaS partner.
Offer multi-currency accounts and FXGive business or consumer customers accounts in EUR, GBP, USD and beyond, with transparent FX and international transfers.
White-label a banking product for enterpriseStand up a co-branded banking experience for a bank, telco or retailer — with the BaaS provider handling core banking, statements and regulatory reporting.