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Friday, December 13, 2024

With Embedded Finance, Online Businesses Can Put Payments, Compliance, and Loyalty on Autopilot

Embedded Finance Solutions Encourage Customer Loyalty
Andrew Allen

Writer: Andrew Allen

Andrew Allen

Andrew Allen, Staff Writer

For nearly 20 years, Andrew has worked for financial institutions ranging from regional investment organizations to some of the largest banks in the world. At Wells Fargo, Andrew was a Consultant within the Insight and Innovation division. A graduate of the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, Andrew’s goal has been promoting personal financial wellness and solid money decisions. As a Staff Writer for CardRates, Andrew seeks to inform readers of solutions to help them on their path to financial freedom.

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Lillian Guevara-Castro

Editor: Lillian Guevara-Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro

Lillian Guevara-Castro, Senior Editor

Lillian Guevara-Castro brings more than 30 years of editing and journalism experience to the CardRates team. She has worked at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Gwinnett Daily News, Gainesville Sun, and The New York Times, where she covered demographics, consumer issues, and the business and financial sectors. Lillian has a degree in journalism and communications from Georgia State University and brings her fact-checking expertise to ensure Digital Brands content is accurate and engaging.

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Adam West

Reviewer: Adam West

Adam West

Adam West, Managing Editor

Adam has interviewed over 1,000 finance experts since joining the CardRates team in 2016. He spearheads industry news coverage related to helping consumers achieve greater financial literacy and improved credit. He has more than 12 years of storytelling, editing, and design experience in print and online journalism and is most knowledgeable in the areas of credit scores, financial products and services, and the banking industry.

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In a Nutshell: In the world of eCommerce, businesses use any advantage they can to gain an edge on their competitors. The embedded finance services ConnectPay provides equip businesses to increase revenue and promote loyalty among their customers. ConnectPay’s solutions integrate into a business’s platforms to provide a seamless user experience.

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Still, other inventions turn out to be all people expect them to be and more. Experts speculated that the World Wide Web would change how people communicate and how businesses serve their customers. Those predictions have proven to be accurate.

Businesses use websites to reach customers around the world. But no matter how good a company’s website is, without embedded finance solutions, it won’t be as powerful as it could be.

ConnectPay provides embedded finance solutions that allow a business to embed accounts, payments, and cards into its online platform. We spoke with Marius Galdikas, ConnectPay’s CEO and Co-Founder, to learn more about the innovative tools the company offers to businesses. Galdikas told us ConnectPay formed in response to market forces.

ConnectPay logo

“We didn’t start ConnectPay because we had some idea or vision of a problem that we wanted to solve for the world,” Galdikas told us. “The only thing that we identified from the very beginning was that we were going to be in the B2B space, and we were going to help businesses with their online needs. So, essentially our first definition of our target customer was that they needed to be a business that operated online.”

Anyone who’s attempted to start a business before knows that it isn’t easy. Galdikas told us that building a fintech from scratch was a lot of work, and he and his team underestimated just how difficult it would be to create the foundation of ConnectPay. 

The company didn’t have the backing of institutional investors, which initially prevented it from building everything it needed to succeed. But ConnectPay had something else on its side — a plan.

“We decided to just gradually follow what our customers needed from us,” Galdikas told us. “We began to grow through word-of-mouth recommendations as we were developing our technology and product suite. It was really a natural evolution.”

A Skilled Team Delivers Diverse Solutions

If you only know one thing about Boise State Broncos football, it’s probably that they play on blue turf. Viewers who weren’t aware of that probably thought something was wrong with the color on their TV sets the first time they flipped the station to one of the school’s home games. When we encounter something that’s markedly different from what we expect it to be, it catches our attention.

Galdikas told us one thing that differentiates ConnectPay from its competitors is that its staff is very involved in technology. The company’s team built its entire technology stack without outside assistance.

“Right from the very beginning, the majority of our staff had a hand in our technology and product development,” Galdikas told us. “We’re not going to put a product out there and just start marketing it and wasting money on customer acquisition costs if it isn’t something that creates real value for the customer. The stage that we’re in right now is one where we have a full focus on offering embedded finance and banking as a service.”

Galdikas told us that, now that ConnectPay offers a robust array of services, it’s turning more of its attention toward marketing and business development. 

Marius Galdikas
Marius Galdikas is ConnectPay’s CEO and Co-Founder.

ConnectPay serves businesses in the corporate enterprise space. Its customers are primarily located in the European Economic Area, although Galdikas told us the company works with customers from all over the world that require its services.

ConnectPay engages with remittance businesses that need the capability to accept payments from entities in Europe. The company provides onboarding and payment collection solutions to assist those businesses.

ConnectPay also targets sports clubs with solutions that can help them grow the loyalty of their fan bases. Galdikas told us many sports clubs are worried about engaging with their fans. The company’s solutions allow sports clubs to connect with their fans better by embedding accounts, wallets, and white-label cards into a sports club’s applications.

“We also work with all types of alternative investment, P2P lending, and crowdfunding platforms that connect borrowers and investors,” Galdikas told us. “What we essentially provide for them is the capability to onboard both sides, collect funds from the investors, and pass them on to the borrowers. As we move forward, I think we’ll gradually expand our offerings to more verticals.”

Rewards Programs Lead to Loyal Customers

A business won’t stay open very long if it doesn’t have a way to collect funds from its customers. Collecting payments can be more challenging when a business doesn’t have face-to-face interactions with its clientele. 

ConnectPay offers businesses different means of collecting funds and holds them in a settlement account managed by ConnectPay. The company also offers banking services and issues debit cards. Galdikas told us the depth of services ConnectPay offers means that some businesses that work with the company won’t need to engage with a traditional bank.

Businesses looking to establish a rewards program for their customers can also benefit from working with ConnectPay.

ConnectPay card image
Debit cards from ConnectPay can help businesses grow customer loyalty.

“The majority of retailers want to offer some kind of loyalty program that provides their customers with points or cashback when they make purchases,” Galdikas told us. “The private debit card market in Europe is very highly regulated — interchange is much better in the States — so offering a card alone won’t cut it. Businesses have to have a loyalty program to offer along with their suite of products, and that’s where we come in.”

ConnectPay helps retailers offer customers a wallet in the business’s app where they can store money. Businesses can issue their customers a white-label debit card provided by ConnectPay they can use to make purchases with the funds they’ve stored within a company’s app. 

Companies can offer cardholders discounts when they use their card at partner stores. In addition to enjoying increased spend and customer loyalty, businesses working with ConnectPay can also harness the power of their customers’ purchase data.

“Retailers and sports clubs want to be able to access that data that informs them of a user’s behavior,” Galdikas told us. “They want to know more than just what a customer’s buying, such as where an item was bought and information that can help them discern who something was bought for. We’ve upgraded our loyalty program to allow businesses to lock in with their fans, engage with them more, and drive them to buy more products and services.”

Initial Consultations Help Ensure Successful Partnerships

ConnectPay seeks to work with established businesses. The company actively reaches out to potential customers and attends industry events to generate awareness of its solutions. Galdikas told us the company has received thousands of communications in 2024 from businesses interested in exploring how ConnectPay can help them grow.

ConnectPay interface image
ConnectPay’s solutions integrate into a business’s platform.

ConnectPay consults with prospective clients to help them understand how their products can align with a business’s approach to eCommerce. Galdikas said once ConnectPay and a prospective customer collaborate to identify the solutions that can help the customer accomplish its goals, the new business relationship moves to the due diligence phase.

“We need to understand what a business wants to achieve, what type of service they offer, who their customer is, and what their customers’ habits are,” Galdikas told us. “Once we have that, we can formulate the solutions to get them where they need to go. We offer a bunch of APIs that businesses can integrate into their solutions, and at some point we’ll maybe be able to define the APIs to allow businesses to serve themselves.”

ConnectPay frequently enhances its solutions to meet customer needs. Galdikas said the company learns from its customers and updates its products accordingly so the next customer it serves can benefit from improvements influenced by real-world scenarios.

You can learn a lot about a company from its slogan. Nike’s “Just do it” slogan communicates the company aspires to motivate people to push boundaries. Galdikas told us that ConnectPay’s slogan — “Relax. We Won’t” — explains how the company approaches customer service.

“Essentially, what we’re saying with our slogan is that our customers should relax and focus on their business, and let us handle the heavy lifting,” Galdikas told us. “All the solutions we offer, whether they be related to financial services, compliance, or risk and fraud management, can be integrated. We relieve our customers of the burden of having to worry about these things.”