The Architects: Reimagining The Financial Future

Embedded Finance as a Catalyst for Fintech Innovation

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This week in The Architects, we’re diving into one of the most important shifts in fintech: how embedded finance is becoming the financial infrastructure for millions of small businesses. 

Hosts Julie VerHage-Greenberg and Emmalyn Shaw sit down with Itai Damti (Co-Founder and CEO, Unit) and Amit Sagiv (VP of Payments and Financial Services, Wix).

 Together, they unpack:
 • Why software platforms are becoming financial powerhouses
 • How Wix built checking and instant access to earnings for merchants
 • What Unit’s architecture enables behind the scenes
 • How AI is reshaping onboarding, risk, and agentic spend
 • What all of this means for the future of SMB money management
It’s a deep look at the technology, incentives, and design decisions defining the next decade of embedded finance

Flourish Ventures is an $850M global early-stage venture firm that backs entrepreneurs transforming financial systems for the better. Its portfolio spans more than 100 companies across the U.S. and emerging markets. The firm also supports innovators shaping policy, media, and research to accelerate lasting change in financial services.

This Week in Fintech (TWIF) is the largest fintech community in the world, presenting news, podcasts and newsletters from around the world. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest in news opinions, and all things financial technology.


Itai Damti:

This is not an AI problem. This is a basic, you know, 1980s. Bring data from different systems and just to visualize something that all systems see. They just see it in isolation. It's like the elephant where you know different people, the blind people feel the elephant, and each person feels like a different part, and you don't really know what's there. But we need to expose the elephant and show small businesses how their money is going to behave. We also have a lot of focus on it as a company because in most use cases that power that you need powers, we have some external bank account like Chase. We have the money that sits in the platform, we have payables that are scheduled for payment, and we technically have the 360 view of the business. Now it's only a matter of visualizing it and allowing people to take action.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Welcome back to our podcast in this special series co-created with Flourish Ventures, the architects. We're spotlighting the people and ideas reshaping the U.S. financial ecosystem.

Emmalyn Shaw:

And I'm Emmeline Shaw, co-founder and managing partner of Flourish Ventures. Today we're diving into one of FinTech's most dynamic frontiers, embedded finance, how everyday platforms are becoming financial powerhouses. We're joined by two people at the heart of that transformation, Itai Gamti, co-founder and CEO of Unit, the leading embedded finance platform, and Amit Zagiv, co-head of payments and financial services at WIPS.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Together, they're making it possible for millions of businesses to access banking, payments, and lending.

Emmalyn Shaw:

In this conversation, we'll explore what inspired each entrepreneur to take on this challenge, how mission and talent drive execution, how technology and AI innovation set them apart. And what kind of ROI is convincing software platforms to fully embrace the fintech transformation?

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Let's dive in and let's get it started with quick backgrounds on both of you. So, Itai, we can start with you.

Itai Damti:

Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for hosting us. My name is Itai Damti. I'm co-founder and CEO at Unit, based here in New York. Unit is an embedded finance solutions company that delivers its solutions via two main ways. One is build your own, which is what Wix is doing. Happy to dive into today. The other one is a suite of ready-to-launch solutions that are fully managed by Unit and also used by market leaders. We power financial offerings for more than 2 million end users through more than 100 platforms like Wix and have raised uh money most recently in 2022, and that was a Series C. And you know, great to have uh to have Amit and Am on the show today.

Amit Sagiv:

And uh nice to meet you all. My name is Amit Sagiv. I've been at Wix for almost eight years now. Uh was very fortunate to build uh and uh co-manage the whole fintech uh arm of Wix. Uh we basically give services all across the world uh to merchants of various sizes, from the smallest one to big enterprise uh solutions that want to build their presence and run their businesses through the Wix operating system, providing websites, apps, terminals, and also financial services, as uh we're gonna explore today. Uh we power many versatile verticals, uh, what one would call vertical SAS, but we basically power e-commerce, booking, hotels, uh digital goods, uh, all kinds of services across uh various different industries. And it's been a hell of a ride helping all those businesses grow, process, and now spend and uh manage their funds. Happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us, you guys. Uh Itai, I want to start with you. You started Unit, I believe it was 2019, 2018, so kind of right before COVID. And it was before I really had heard much about embedded finance. So, what was it that you were kind of what gap, I guess, were you seeing at that time? And uh, what was your initial plan to try to fill it?

Itai Damti:

Yeah, so back then I think we uh we had been uh longtime fintech founders, thinking about what's next for us. Um we thought about what fintech was back then, and we saw two different waves. One was coming to an end, and one was just getting started. The wave that was coming to an end is what we called FinTech 1.0. That's companies like Chime and Lending Club and Venmo that basically try to compete in financial services and be a pure play fintech and try to kind of undermine the incumbents. Uh, we have seen some of these companies becoming household names. Uh, we've seen hundreds of companies basically uh not being able to make it and to shine against the incumbents. But in any case, we thought that this was not going to be a sustained ecosystem. We saw something new that was just getting started at the time. And this was when companies like Toast and Shopify and Uber and Lyft and Gasto and many others have expanded from their core businesses into money services of all sorts. Uh, we've seen them launching cards, we've seen them launching accounts, we've seen some of them launching capital money movement. And we thought a few things about this wave that was just getting started. One, it was the beginning of what we thought was going to be a tsunami in financial services. There are thousands of companies that are really well positioned to try to compete for uh market share in financial services and kind of turn themselves from just software companies into software plus money companies. Uh the second thing we we noticed is that unlike the Venmos, uh, those companies had a true unfair advantage over some of the incumbent banks because they had the data and the distribution, the trust, the software that they've been building over years. And we've seen how easy it is to add that context to financial services and make them better and more accessible. So the right to win was unique, I think, in that wave. And the third is that the tooling that was available to them actually sucked. Like if you think how companies were built in the age of CHIME and Venmo, all of them had to cobble together usually between 15 and 25 solutions that range from identifying the end user to managing security and fraud, to managing ledgers and card issuing and maybe even card printing, money movement, reconciliation, statements, you name it. It was a very complex undertaking. And we thought that if we if anyone was to enable the next 1000, it had to be something new. It had to be something that is a lot more plug-and-play. And that's what we set out to build with Unit. Uh, we have essentially built a core system that integrates with the Fed on one side and uh ends with user interfaces that companies can use. And so it's a pretty pure solution today. Um and it's it's also grown to be more extensive in the sense that it has credit primitives today that we did not have in the beginning. Um, and you know, things like international payments and check sending and check deposits. So today, Unit has built a full-blown core system, but the and the delivery method has evolved. We can talk about that. But the thesis remained the same. We think that companies like Wix and thousands of others can be winners in the next 20 years in financial services, and we would like to enable that movement.

Emmalyn Shaw:

Well, you anticipated my next question, which is how it has really shifted over time. But maybe you can talk a little bit about delivery methods and how that has evolved as well.

Itai Damti:

Yeah, so I think the two topics are pretty connected. Um, I think that we, you know, in building Unit V1 in 2020, we've basically built unit as a system of Legos, right? So Amit and his team are power users of the Lego piece that we call a deposit account. And you can open one or more deposit accounts under a business. Maybe one is going to be a place for them to park their main cash balance, and a second is going to be saving for tax or saving for payroll. Um, and so we made the system quite modular, and you could use those Legos to be to build custom financial experiences and deliver them. Um, there's another piece of Lego called a credit account, which allows companies to um combine or maybe even only use the credit concept. We have another public company that uses Unit that, in addition to the Lego of a deposit account or multiple pieces of that Lego, um they take about 20% of their customers who are eligible and they give them a credit card that's powered by Unit. And so the system was designed to be modular and allow companies to build their own experiences. But what we've noticed about two years ago is that um what we have been doing still required a lot of effort from companies that build on unit. So unit was able to compress the cost of launching financial services by 80 to 90%. But the effort that remained was not for everyone. And teams like Wix Payments, I mean, Wix is a powerhouse, they have a whole payments company that the meet is leading, and they were able to invest and form opinions on how those services need to be delivered. But what we saw is that many other companies that had all the conditions to succeed, they had fun money flowing through them, they had engaged users, they had good software. Um, there are many companies who did not have the uh the appetite to invest the effort in developing the user interface, deciding on the financial terms, um, doing customer support, uh taking fraud decisions. And that's when we developed the second delivery method, which we call ready to launch. Ready to launch is a money hub for small businesses that can live inside any piece of software. It's a single line of code that then expands into a full financial dashboard. And that financial dashboard has everything except receiving money. Receiving money is something that most software companies already do well. If you think about companies like Shopify, Weeks, Airbnb, Etsy, eBay, all of them are excellent at accepting money on behalf of a small business. But the product we developed is the downstream use of money. So how do you save and organize your money? How do you spend your money, whether it's on cards or other forms of bill payments, and how do you get capital? So companies can choose today if they want to go the weak route and uh build on the custom engine and kind of use the Legos to build their own experience, or take something off the shelf where unit manages the underwriting, the risk, and the evolution of the product, even the customer support, um, and then deliver capital, uh saving and organizing money and spend into one solution. Um I think the next, you know, I think the next 500 buyers or the next 500 companies that might uh make decisions are mostly going to choose more plug-and-play solutions. We think that there are pioneers in the market who are uh very invested in building the custom route. Uh and I believe that many companies, especially large ones, are going to want to build custom over time. But this entry point into financial services that's a lot more convenient, is the new way that Unity is also delivering our services.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Let me, you've helped millions of entrepreneurs at this point get online. Why was adding products like Wix checking the natural next step? And were there some other ideas that maybe you you toyed around with too to help sort of solve the pain point that you were going after?

Amit Sagiv:

For us, it's been it's been evident for a very long time. A lot of what Itai just mentioned was something we were hearing from our users, living them. You know, we follow the user. This is the premise of Wix. Uh, we have to understand what they're doing deeply, where are their gaps, where is the market failing them? How are they, you know, persevering all this hardship? And it was clear that uh while money in is fairly simple, money management is a very hard task. And capital is almost like a roadblock to a lot of them. So that was coming as a repetitive narrative from customer conversations. Very early on, uh, we decided to take a leap into those uh waters and understand deeply where the gaps are and what do they need and how we can best serve them. Uh, this is where the Lego pieces of what Itai mentioned really fitted in because we were looking for this composability. Uh, we processed uh money in with three of the biggest providers in the world, Audience, Tribe, PayPal, and with many other locals, uh, in our own Wix Payment solution. And we needed to fund all of those funds into a single account that really uh creates a unified point of view for the merchant. Uh, if you think about the SMB that's building their life, usually it's uh a handful of people in the business, if not less. And uh it's very hard when you think about it. They have uh uh a Wix terminal, a Stripe terminal, a QuickBooks terminal, and then they have their um Chase or Bank of America or whatever, and they don't speak to one another. It came really strong as COVID arised, and people were faced with a very mixed uh money management system where their personal and their business were in one and they couldn't apply for uh PPP loans, and businesses were dying, and you couldn't really help them because their fundamentals were so mixed. That's where the vision that we've had all along kind of got in that very strong market signal that we have to get there. And the first point we touched was uh how instant can you touch your earnings? Um and as Itai mentioned, we've built our own proprietary solution with Unit to facilitate real instant. So we're taking care of risk, and we have our mechanisms and our models that uh know our users extremely deeply well, and we actually facilitate uh instant money availability on our checking account. So if you sold a pair of shoes and you are not flagged for any risk reasons, you will be able to spend your revenues immediately. Uh to bridge all of those uh what we might look at simple, oh, it's just a few days until you get your money in your bank. But for merchants, it's the most sensitive point in their life. Uh especially if they have uh if they're in the beginning or if their frequency is not very high. And uh this is really kind of democratizing access uh to real business, right? Things that were in the past really saved for top-tier users, how we as a platform can distribute this really high quality service to so many. Um and I think it resonates with them. They understand that they're seen uh and they understand that they're getting a very um I would say high quality uh uh solution uh almost without even asking for it. They didn't know that that's what they needed. So the strongest, the strongest uh uh feedback that we're getting is I thought I needed my money instantly, but what you guys actually created was real transparency into my business that I didn't have before.

Itai Damti:

I saw a demo of what Amit is describing uh uh a year ago in in a short, like 20-second video, and it was mind-blowing. The idea that a small business can sell something online if you're a yoga teacher and you sell a mattress or you sell a class, and now you're able to spend the funds immediately. Um, it's really, really powerful. And also, it gave us the idea that you know what we are all doing is giving money meaning. When Amit said that you are able to get transparency into your business, I mean think about the same yoga teacher if she has an account on Chase. Um, she might sell for a week and then get a plus 800 or plus you know 1000 into Chase, but the plus 1000 has no context. What was it for? Is it for mattresses, for classes? Is this money that I'm going to make again, or is this money that I just made on a one-time basis? Um this connecting the dots between my world as a seller and the money movements that I'm seeing in my account, this is really powerful. And you can also apply to the expenses side. And you spend from a Chase debit card, uh, you could you spend on inventory and you spend on rent, uh, maybe by by sending uh bank transfer out. Uh, there is no easy meaning that those transactions have today, right? It's just money movements plus and minus, but it doesn't connect to something that they care about.

Emmalyn Shaw:

I mean, maybe if you could just share a little bit about the biggest technical design challenges that you've had in embedding financial services directly into the Wix platform. How have you approached some of those challenges?

Amit Sagiv:

So there are many challenges all along the way. In the past, I've built a new bank, but you are under a very different kind of stock and understanding because usually you have full license and you're under regulation. And here, the way we're working with uh unit and with uh Lincoln Savings Bank as our bank uh that's powering uh uh this uh activity, you we need to learn how to work in this new arrangement. So there is a question of how you construct technology with operational processes and risk in a way that is really scalable. Okay? It's not just here's an account, we'll put some money in and you can spend it. We have to support it with something that scales to hundreds of thousands of users uh with different uh user sizes, user types, uh, KYC credentials, you name it, it's there. Uh various different businesses. And you have to make sure that everybody's experience is really smooth. So, from a technical perspective, a lot of what we did was uh programmatic onboarding because we've already onboarded these users to a payment uh facility, approved them, we know them, we have some credentials on them. We want to make the transition into having a checking account very smooth. So, how do you pass all this information, validate it along the way, without creating huge drops in your funnel, without leaving any gaps of data? Um and at the same time, you want to bring uh your edge, right? The data, the heavy level of data, insights, and intimacy that we have with the users, you want to bring it into the products. So uh that was behind what we did with the instant payout. How do you understand the risk deeply? How do you facilitate this uh onboarding in a really smooth way? Because the worst thing you can do is to say to a user, I'm gonna do something, and then deny it from them after. So we really worked on pre-approvals and understanding ahead of time who can get what, uh, and making sure that we stretch those boundaries with our partners while staying, you know, fully compliant, fully regulated, uh, to withstand whatever turmoil is happening in the market in the best way. That was a big challenge.

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Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

I type, how has your platform made it easier for SaaS companies, SaaS businesses to embed financial services themselves? And then how much simpler is it now for someone that's just getting started in that space versus what it might have been, you know, five, six years ago before embedded finance really took off?

Itai Damti:

So I think about it as two steps. Uh the by launching unit, I think we simplified, call it 90%. And by launching the generation of ready-to-launch solutions that I mentioned, it's another 90% on the remaining effort. Um so you can choose what steps, um, what step you want to enter the market at. But I would say that before Unit existed, as I mentioned, companies did have to make a lot of buying decisions and cobble together many solutions. And so I think about unit as a system, again, that goes pretty wide and also pretty deep. I think you know, we looked at companies like Rippling when we started, and we thought they did something that's like unreasonably wide, but they did it for the right reasons. And you know, Rippling is a company that has the ambition to be very, very comprehensive, but it's something that many people thought was unthinkable before that. So I think Unit was, we kind of designed it with the same principle, which is I'll give an example. Um, things like identifying end users are built into unit if companies like Twix choose to use them. They can also toggle them off in agreement with the bank. We generate statements where a lot of our solutions in our space don't. Uh we send 2FA to the phone of the end user to enable a wire to go out and ensure security, which many solutions don't. And we have a lot of controls within the dashboard that allow companies like Wix to take customer support uh tickets and resolve them on the spot. Uh we have disputes in the system. Most companies in our space that issue cards have a complete blind spot to the dispute process and any resulting fraud. And so by bringing all of these together into one ecosystem, we were able to launch a V1 that allowed companies like Wix to choose a bank and choose unit and get going. A lot of decisions need to be made between Wix and the bank, but by using the technology, we're able to check a lot of the what's called program management boxes and automate those tasks and give the bank visibility into what Wix is doing, and of course allow Wix to write into the system and read into the system with a dashboard and with data pipelines. Um, as I said, this V1 was still relatively involved with companies like Wix. They had to use components and build their user interface, they had to conduct customer support activities. And in the case of Wix, that actually worked because Wix is very insistent on controlling and obsessing with user experience. Um but that kind of informed the next leap into the off-the-shelf solutions.

Amit Sagiv:

I think what we found really appealing is you guys leave no stone unturned, which is a rare but very important commodity, especially in FinTech, when you're touching such complex and intricate flows. It's usually very easy to cover the vanilla use case. Uh but the the real uh art to high quality service and products is in the extra. Those uh those edge I don't like them being called edge cases because everybody gets them. They're noting the edge. They are the journey that uh uh people who use bank accounts go through. Um they need reports, like we need uh disputes. Like these are things that are not nice to have. They are fundamental, and the way you guys build it allows each party in this engagement to actually do its role. The bank is really the bank. And the platform is really the platform, and you and you know that if there's a gap that is technological and you guys can bridge it, you will.

Itai Damti:

The design decision that helps us, I think, move fast is that we control all the stack from the Federal Reserve to the user interface. So when we started, even when Weeks actually started working with us, about 90% of payments on unit were actually processed with legacy banking systems that we depended on. So each bank provided its own connectivity that moves money via ACH or checks or wires, and then we plugged into that specific um system that they provided. And then in 2022, we got certification from the Fed after going through a year and a half of basically building a better connectivity. And today, 100% of the payments on units move directly between the bank and the Federal Reserve. And that means that there is no check deposits or check sending or ACH or same-day ACH that we don't control. And that allows us to iterate very fast on the system as opposed to being uh dependent on legacy systems. And I think that independence allows us to also think bigger. We are adding international payments right now, push the card and other elements, RTP, other elements that just give more value. And I can give another tangible example from the Wix um environment that shows why Unit cares about building more than the basic use case. Uh, we have the notion of terms for end users in the system. And Amit just mentioned how you how Wix might want to put different users in different risk buckets. So if someone has been using Wix for three years and processing big payment volumes and they're a high volume merchant, you also want to give them a VAP banking experience. And that VAP experience can translate to higher interest, higher limits, higher cashback, lower payment fees. And to program out of that is difficult. So unit has this notion of a user group in the system, a cohort. And Wix can create as many of these cohorts as they want. We have some customers that have 25 different groups in their system, and then you can assign a user to a group and you can call them standard user today and then upgrade them to a VAP. And it's just a single API call. And then from that moment, the limits are going to be different, the fees are going to be different, and Wix would not have to code to make those things different. And so that's that's why I think Amit said that uh edge cases is not the way to think about it. I agree. I think about it as completeness.

Amit Sagiv:

Yes.

Itai Damti:

Coverage for what makes financial services actually fit well into environments like Wix.

Emmalyn Shaw:

We couldn't have a podcast without at least mentioning where we think the companies are evolving as it relates to automation and AI. And obviously you guys are very much at the forefront. Can you talk a little bit about how your technologies, how these technologies are reshaping perhaps customer experience, operational efficiency, and how do you guys are staying ahead of that change as it relates to your own platforms?

Amit Sagiv:

Look, uh I'm trying not to sound uh too too buzzworty, but we've been we've been building AI since 2016. We had our first website editor using AI that only since then evolved and evolved. But very early in the payment days, we understood that for us to create real efficiency and real user service at the highest level, we cannot be manual. We cannot have our operational heavily uh set on manual decisions and checks. And we've basically developed our own methodology in the last uh, I would say five years where we automate, create what now is considered an agent orchestration system. So if you'd imagine catalogs of hundreds and thousands of products across multiple user types, and you need to uh make sure that they adhere to any kind of payment regulation, even before the money flows into the bank account. So if you're selling alcohol, you need age restriction. If you're uh selling uh uh beauty products, we have to make sure that they might not have some ingredients that are uh limited. Um so we've developed along the way tools that look at the entire user protocol like catalogs and screen out, let's call them, the products that shouldn't be there. And maybe the merchant didn't know. So we assume first that uh all merchants come in goodwill. So we won't close them. We will remove a product and then uh communicate to the user that something that he's done might not be within regulation, but he can still continue to process. So AI is constantly keeping us compliant on the one hand and making sure that funds that flow in are legit. But also on the risk level, we constantly evaluate risk and take uh decisions based on insights that were trained by us. That's on the operational level. When it comes to hand-holding the user's hand, uh there are AI chat agents all across Wix. Uh we have very advanced tools in our system that uh product managers, designers, any kind of profession can actually add skills to the system. You don't need to be a programmer, you add the context, you add uh you build those agents within the environment. We've uh recently acquired Base44, which is a vibe coding platform for all the new age of app builders that are coming by the millions uh to base 44, and they're building the new generation of apps. Um, these are super gifted people with bright minds, uh, and we're actually giving them the most advanced tools to pursue those dreams. And at the end of those dreams, there's also money processing and uh everything that comes with it because uh that hasn't been reinvented yet. That's what we're doing now. Specifically inside uh the payment and and uh money management space, we're crafting a lot of new uh ways to signal to the merchant where they are in their life cycle, what should they do next? Where are they where are they in terms of their financial health? I think it's it's there's still a stretch to go until users really adopt all of these assistants in a real natural way, but we're already seeing conversations that are done with our uh agent on where is my payout? And the agent actually provides explanation on where it is and when will it come and when will it land, and what should you track. And those were complaints that usually went to customer care. And now the user actually resolves and gets educated and progresses with their own life. Um so we see a lot of implementation um on all fields in inside Wix.

Itai Damti:

So on our side, um, just one fun fact Base44, I think, is an amazing product. And we've built our entire internal product uh platform with base44. So, Amit, I don't know if you knew it, but uh we communicate between product to the rest of the team on upcoming plans, including schedules and you know visual schedules. Uh, and then you can click on an item, see what's being built, see when it's been shipped, see which teams it might affect, what's the value prop. And we do all of that with base44. I mean, it's incredible how much you can do with just like instructing a system. Um so kudos to our product team and uh thank you, Amit, for uh enabling it with uh and I think it was a great acquisition, by the way. I think it was a very crafty team that uh can do what it does best within the the weeks uh org. Uh when I think about AI and money, I mean initially I kind of I'll be honest, like I don't usually buy into hype quickly and I dismissed uh the immediate effects on financial services. I think so a fraud is obviously like a very big thing that's going to open up because AI makes it much easier to trick people and do it at scale. Um so that that was always like something I thought about. But I think when I think about um AI and money, I think about AI being able to read your money and AI being able to write into your money. That's kind of how the framework we use. And reading, I think, is best explained by you know, imagine somebody logs into their Wix checking account and they ask questions. They can ask simple questions about money, like how much did I pay in fees in the last year? Or they can ask, where's my payout, like Amit mentioned, or they can ask, how much did I make this week? And it's a relatively simple question to answer from the database that we provide, and companies like Wix can spin up those types of use cases really quickly. You can also read at a higher level, for example, hey Weeks, how much did I spend on marketing and what was the return on investment? That's a very, very good question to ask that goes way beyond what you can ask Chase, but says the dots that they connect can connect for the small business. So that's kind of the ultimate way of reading everything about your business, whatever type of business you might be. And then you can um you can answer questions. You can also ask Quix, hey, you just removed this product from my database because it was flagged. Uh, how much money do I stand to not make uh by uh after this product was removed? Right? So really interesting ways to connect the money side and the the business side of the house. When I think about agents writing into your money, that's literally spending money and making money. And that's really exciting. I think it's kind of nascent. Um recently spent time with a few companies that are building agentic spend tools. And that's you know, the idea that if I'm a Weeks merchant, um maybe I want to ask Weeks to um spend money on five advertising platforms on my behalf and help me grow my business. That's actually a pretty hard task because it requires me to maybe approve where the money will be spent, or maybe if the agent sees a unique opportunity to spend more on Facebook, but you know, maybe more in a way that puts me in distress, I as the business owner might need to approve it. Um, so there's all sorts of you know, agent spending on behalf of people in businesses that I think we will start to see. But it's a very, very nascent use case. And I think the read use cases are going to come much sooner than the write use cases.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

For me, I feel like as a small business, I would feel much more comfortable asking AI, like, hey, like where did I spend my money last week and where was the return versus giving it, hey, here's you know, X number of dollars, go ahead and go spend it for me. Like, I don't know that I feel quite comfortable yet. But I mean, what are you seeing? Because you are actually seeing how people are using their money and stuff on your platform.

Amit Sagiv:

So uh not to say that it's already fully hygenic, but uh from conversations we've had, most of the bakers are not marketers. I think that's a fact. And uh if you want to focus on your bakery and you don't want to focus on your marketing, then you would start with a small amount because you're afraid, and you would maybe put a hundred dollar into that budget controlled by the AI. But if it will be ROI positive, trust will be built. And the the that uh read and write will become more and more prominent. So I will uh just like if you get a bad answer when you ask how much money I've made last week, and it gives you a wrong number, and you're like, I can't ask you anything because this is wrong information. So you build trust, and we feel very comfortable right now because so far we've mostly consumed information from these systems. We've not yet asked them to do big, heavy things. Like they can plan my Italy trip, but I'm not comfortable yet for it to buy me a uh plane ticket, even though it might probably do a better job than most of us. So I think it's it's more of a gradual motion, but it's very clear that it's going there. When it comes to budget management, most businesses don't know how to do budget management. It's very hard, especially if uh your mind is in so many other places of your business. It's very hard to kind of uh dictate, uh the dedicate time to learn that space. And what is the right amount to save? And how much should I leave for taxes? And what will happen in the uh in the seas in the seasonal sales, and what will happen in uh Black Friday? All of these factors are usually very hard for an SMB to put into one thought and actually follow it. So as we build these constructs that are uh uh powering the SMBs, I actually believe we will see a lot of Igenic spend. It will be in the beginning very nascent, as you said, and probably in platform in a much more controlled way. But as we progress towards more sophisticated uh uh situations, I believe we'll see much more. And through uh another piece of technology that we haven't mentioned yet, which is stable coins uh or the programmable aspect of money. If something can be allocated for marketing only, and the money actually is bounded by these instructions, I am more confident in the machine that it won't spend above my limits or outside of the boundaries that I want it to do. So there are aspects that today are hard to uh control. And I believe that in the next year or two we will see much more control going into the merchant's hand in a simple way. Because if you combine The two things. So I can read, as you said, I can ask questions and understand things. And then it's very easy for me to say at the end, okay, so for the next time, let's just put $50. And the instruction is very natural language kind of instruction, which then translates into a very complicated underlying uh uh you know transaction that's being done behind the scenes. So those two I really believe will meet the embedded space really deeply.

Itai Damti:

Yeah, I think at the same time, I mean, think about the problems that most small businesses have today. Uh they're very basic. Yes. Right? Like a small business uh bakery or e-commerce business or construction company, most of them are confused about cash flow. Because the information about expenses, the timing of expense, and the nature of expense lives in one system, information about their cash lives in another system, their payroll exists in another system, and they have no way to connect the dots. The dots exist, they just exist in silos. And if you bring it all together and visualize cash flow for a small business, that's already a massive step up.

Amit Sagiv:

Yes.

Itai Damti:

Right? Like, how do I not spend too much money on marketing today because I forget that I have a big vendor payment coming up in eight days, and that's going to wreck me? Uh, do I need do can I have the confidence to spend money on marketing today? Or should I take a step back and spend less because this payment is coming? Again, it's like this is not an AI problem. This is a basic, you know, 1980s. Bring data from different systems and just to visualize something that all systems see. They just see it in isolation. It's like the elephant where you know different people, the blind people feel the elephant and each person feels like a different part, and you don't really know what's there. But we need to expose the elephant and show small businesses how their money is going to behave. Uh, we also have a lot of um focus on it as a company because in most use cases that that power that unit powers, we have some external bank account like Chase. We have the money that sits in the platform, we have payables that are scheduled for payment, and we technically have the 360 view of the business. Now it's only a matter of visualizing it and allowing people to take action.

Emmalyn Shaw:

When you think about something that FinTech has achieved faster than you expected, what would that be? And then what has taken longer than you thought would at this point in time?

Amit Sagiv:

When I saw COVID accelerate commerce.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

And you mean online commerce, like e-commerce?

Amit Sagiv:

Online commerce. Online commerce has has been accelerated. We've all felt it all around the world. It put us in a different place. Uh, some things that I saw there I thought will stick, and they did not. So you couldn't run a business if you're not online. And that kind of uh statement was not something we could have said in the past. You would ask a merchant, he would tell you, no, I've got my shop, it's a brick and mortar. I like when my customers come in, I know them, they know me. This is the business. But the reality forced them to take their presence online. I actually thought that will remain in a sense, but we see uh that people some of them remained very online forward, but some did not. So that actually surprised me because we actually saw businesses succeed and grow, and it was really like a power engine going forward. So that is something I actually thought would last and accelerate even further. But I guess there's you know many powers in the world that are pushing these small businesses up and down, uh, not just the uh digital online presence, right? When when it comes to something that surprised me in its speed, the way I see my daughter uses ChatGPT is mind-blowing.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

How old is your daughter?

Amit Sagiv:

So I have three girls, uh, and all of them are ChatGPT, savvy five, ten, and twelve.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Five-year-old even. That's terrifying, huh?

Amit Sagiv:

It's it's not terrifying because if you think about it, this is where a lot of the society is bringing its information from right now. So if you speak to them about search, they don't know what search is. Just ask the chat. Uh so and that became rapid growth of that concept.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

So new so like I remember my parents say, I used to have to go to the library to figure out information, and I'll say, I used to have to Google something to find information.

Amit Sagiv:

Yes, and also you you'd need to read, you'd need to read and sif out information, and now you can just like give it to me in one line. Yeah.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

So that man, I'm old enough to remember Google. That's now a thing. Crazy.

Ad:

Yeah, it is a thing.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

Itai, what about you?

Itai Damti:

Just a fun fact before I begin. My dad talks to ChatGPT on WhatsApp. That's amazing. So that's his UI for ChatGPT. He just asks them a question on WhatsApp. It's a contact. I love it. So uh I'm gonna say two very basic things, but I I like going back to basics. So on what we've achieved faster than than expected, I think scale and security. If you put aside one or maybe two notable examples for fintech going wrong in the last few years, um, I think if you look at the history, like the last 15-year history of fintech innovation in the US especially, I mean, it's pretty shocking that companies have been able to scale and secure a tremendous number of dollars. Um I mean, the fact that we did never had a massive case of fraud that you know brought down a fintech company. I mean, again, specific anecdotes aside, but um, and and and not in all cases, there's obviously bad intention, but I'm looking at companies like Chime that I'm invested in, and it's it's and many more in this category. Relay, Mercury, Ramp, um, the fact that those companies are able to confidently, securely, and scalably deal with money, um, and that there's so many of them, and that there hasn't been a mass incident involving the fintech company to me is incredible. Again, it there was it happened once, but I think if you look at it in kind of the scale of financial innovation in the last 15 years, I think it's it's pretty remarkable how much of the ecosystem was able to scale confidently and safely. Um, you know, unit processes 18 million API calls per day. I think if you add collectively the ramps and units and Mercury's and Wix and many other companies, you'll just find that there's probably like billions of API calls being processed per day or week. And that's not something that I take for granted. So that's kind of the good side. Um the on the slow side, I would say like digital payments, I mean, to a mid's point, uh, there's so much demand for check deposits, check sending, lockboxes, uh, wires and cash deposits in today's ecosystem. I mean, I think a lot of small businesses in different industries still depend on non-digital money solutions. And that's just something you have to design for when you think about these types of systems. I think it will change quickly, but I also um I think that it's uh it's pretty shocking how much of the small businesses, I think it's about 50% of small businesses that still touch checks. Um, and and if that's again, if you want to build a complete financial service, you can't have a blind spot to checks as a result. Um but yeah, I think it's uh everyone, every payments geek who has been in the space for more than 10, 15 years has probably been shocked with how slow the movement to digital has been. Habits are really hard to break, huh? This is there, they're habits are hard to break.

Julie Verhage-Greenberg:

It it took it took a global pandemic to get Apple Pay to take off, and now everyone uses it. So, you know, something that big. Thank you so much for joining us today, you guys. I really appreciate you taking the time. Um, I know you're both very busy people, but I feel like uh, you know, the founders, executives, uh, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs that will listen to this conversation will have a lot to get out of it.

Itai Damti:

Thanks for inviting us.

Amit Sagiv:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was great uh talking to you.