Customers now expect real-time payments that feel like part of the product experience. From in-app transfers between accounts to immediate refunds delivered directly within your brand’s interface, payment journeys need to be fast and frictionless, rather than relying on third-party redirects. 

As a brand evolving into embedded payments or a financial institution optimising your existing payments setup, you know that delivering seamless payment experiences requires more than good UX, however. The backend infrastructure matters, too: API-based scheme connectivity, high straight-through processing rates, and operational resilience all contribute to payment delivery speed and resilience. However, these components are often too complex to build and maintain on your own, so the question is how to assess the right embedded payments partner for your business. 

By embedding a regulated provider’s payment capabilities into your product, you can focus on the front-end customer experience while proven infrastructure runs behind the scenes. But selecting the right partner comes with its own challenges, as each provider differs in terms of payment features, regulatory status, and additional capabilities you may want to explore as your business grows or strategy evolves. 

In this article, we’ll explain when embedded payments make sense for regulated financial institutions and brands, what to look for in a provider, and why choosing a partner with advanced embedded banking capabilities can give you more room to scale. 

• How embedded payments work 
• When it makes sense to embed payments via a regulated provider, and which considerations to keep in mind 
• Why choose ClearBank to embed payments and further banking services into your product 

ClearBank is a bank authorised in the United Kingdom and Europe that offers embedded payment solutions. To learn more about how we can integrate payments into your platform, reach out to us.  

Embedded payments allow financial institutions and brands to integrate payment capabilities directly into their app or platform – without redirecting users to a third party. 

This means that, instead of relying on external banking portals or disconnected providers, payments are initiated, processed, and tracked within your own environment, while a regulated partner provides the underlying infrastructure. 

The step-by-step process looks something like this: 

1. A customer initiates a payment within your platform, for example, to fund an account, make a purchase, receive a payout, or initiate a refund. 
2. You send the payment instruction to your embedded payments provider, often via API.  
3. Your provider validates the payment data and routes it to the appropriate scheme, such as Faster Payments in the UK, for real-time processing. 
4. You receive payment status updates via webhooks or API calls, allowing you to reflect them to your customer. 
5. Balances and transaction histories are automatically updated in your system. 

To the end user, the entire payment experience occurs under your brand and within your company’s environment.

Every business needs to move money. The question is how those payments are delivered, and how much control you need over the experience. 

This is why choosing the right provider can be challenging, as differences in infrastructure, regulatory models, and long-term capabilities can affect how your payment experience performs and scales. 

Typically, it makes sense to embed payments via a provider when: 

If you redirect your customer to a third party during a purchase or withdrawal, you introduce friction at a critical point in the user’s experience. If your customer isn’t familiar with the third-party provider, it may weaken trust, and if the provider experiences technical delays on their end, drop-offs increase. 

If you keep payments fully embedded within your product, you retain full control over the user experience from start to finish, including the UX logic, visuals, and messaging. 

Building the underlying infrastructure, however, comes with several operational challenges: for one, you would need to invest extensive engineering effort in building and maintaining it, as well as reconciling all payment data accurately across systems to ensure that transaction statuses, balances, and reporting remain consistent in preparation for audits. 

As a non-regulated brand, your goal is to embed payments as a seamless feature within your proposition – not create a core proposition. For many, external infrastructure partners enable them to focus on improving the customer experience and expanding their product offering.

Customers expect payments to happen in real time, with clear visibility into where their transactions are going. In a competitive fintech market, any small delays directly impact the user experience, driving churn. 

Firms with payment capabilities already in place typically rely on one of these three: 

• A traditional transaction bank with legacy infrastructure and batch-based processing, which means payment requests are queued and processed at intervals, with limited visibility over status and manual processes that slow down operations internally 
• An Electronic Money Institution (EMI) that delivers faster, automated capabilities via API, but may depend on other providers for factors like payment scheme access, introducing more potential points of failure 
• A licenced bank with an API-first approach that maintains direct payment scheme access, supports straight-through processing capabilities via API for real-time event notifications and updates, and has the regulatory and operational resilience needed for fast payment experiences at scale 

When evaluating the right embedded payments partner, it’s therefore important to ask the provider questions such as: 

• Are you a direct participant in the relevant schemes, or do you access them through another party? And which payment schemes can I connect to through your infrastructure? 
• Are you an API-first provider that can integrate with my own systems and automate payment processing and reconciliation? Or do you depend on legacy infrastructure and manual processes? 
• Which account structures and types do you offer? For example, do you offer customer-segregated accounts for easier reconciliation? 

Be it an EMI looking to offer Cash ISAs to customers or a payroll platform on a mission to deliver savings accounts to employees, there often comes a point when firms want to take their value proposition beyond payments and into deeper banking functionalities. 

While a payments capability allows your customers to fund accounts, transfer money, and make withdrawals, the balances in those accounts are often treated as safeguarded funds: they cannot be eligible for deposit protection schemes like FSCS, and they cannot earn interest. 

Unless your embedded payments partner is a fully licenced bank, that is. With a provider that offers embedded payments as part of a broader embedded banking model, you can: 

• Encourage customers to hold larger balances over time within your ecosystem by offering FSCS-protected and interest-bearing accounts, thereby increasing retention and loyalty 
• Gain deeper insights into long-term customer behaviour, from funding to spending and saving, which can then inform new product developments 
• Create more cross-selling opportunities thanks to greater visibility over customer usage and introduce additional services – like savings accounts or lending – to increase conversion and lifetime value 
• Create a new income stream through interest-sharing arrangements with your embedded banking provider – for example, some providers can enable you to take a percentage of the revenue generated from interest on balances 

The reason it’s important to keep this roadmap in mind when choosing the right embedded payments provider is that EMIs, for instance, cannot deliver the above-mentioned banking functionalities because they aren’t fully licenced banks.  

If you were to partner with an EMI for embedded payments, you would need to change or bolt on additional providers later, adding further complexity and possibly delaying product launches.

ClearBank is a UK-based clearing bank built to support regulated financial institutions and select non-regulated brands looking to embed payments directly into their platforms. 

We provide a fully regulated, API-first infrastructure that operates behind the scenes while you focus on delivering seamless, branded payment experiences within your own interface. 

With more than £18 billion in client deposits, we are a fully licenced bank built to be real-time by default, ensuring near-instant payments for you and your customers. 

Here are a few reasons why businesses like Airwallex, Allica Bank, and Revolut have partnered with ClearBank: 

Deliver fully embedded payments under your brand, with a dedicated infrastructure partner behind the scenes 

With ClearBank, you can embed payments directly into your product via a single API integration so that your customers never have to leave the platform. From onboarding through to payment initiation and confirmation, you remain in full control of the user experience, including UX design, branding, and customer communication. 

Operating in the background as your regulated infrastructure partner, ClearBank is only disclosed where required for regulatory transparency. 

At the same time, you don’t need to stack together multiple providers for scheme access, deposit handling, and account infrastructure. We: 

• Are direct participants in payment schemes such as Faster Payments and CHAPS 
• Hold all deposits securely at the Bank of England, where they’re accessible 24/7/365 
• Offer a range of account types under our transaction banking proposition, including operational accounts and customer-segregated accounts. 
• Deliver interest-bearing, FSCS-protected accounts under our embedded banking proposition, such as current accounts, savings accounts (instant access, savings accounts, joint savings accounts, and U-18s savings accounts), and Cash ISAs 

What’s more, we operate under a B2B model. This means we don’t offer retail banking products directly to end customers, ensuring there is no customer overlap and no competition with your proposition. 

Through our cloud-native, API-driven infrastructure, you don’t need to rely on batch-based processing or manual workflows – instead, payment instructions are submitted via API and routed directly to the relevant payment scheme in real time. 

As payments are processed, real-time status updates are delivered via webhooks and API responses, giving you immediate visibility over transaction outcomes. This allows you to reflect payment statuses back to your customers instantly. 

This means your end-users can: 

• View updated balances in real time 
• Receive near-instant event notifications 
• Trigger immediate payouts 
• Fund accounts instantly 

What’s more, our infrastructure is designed to scale alongside transaction volumes without compromising performance. This means you can support anything from early-stage growth to high-volume payment processing without replatforming or adding more providers. 

If you plan to move beyond embedded payments, ClearBank’s UK banking licence enables you to do exactly that. In addition to embedded payment capabilities, our Embedded Banking proposition allows you to offer regulated deposit accounts, including FSCS-protected and interest-bearing products, directly within your platform. 

All FSCS-eligible deposits are protected up to £120,000 under the UK’s deposit guarantee scheme. Businesses such as Chip, Coinbase, and LemFi initially partnered with us for agency banking before evolving to embedded banking to broaden their propositions. 

And based on an analysis by the leading consultancy firm Forrester and its Total Economic Impact (TEI) model, we have helped our existing customers: 

• Reach up to 90% ROI within 10 months 
• Increase customer retention by 3%, strengthening long-term value 
• Lower customer support demand by around 10%, with ClearBank’s resilient infrastructure helping reduce queries and saving nearly £63,000 
• Unlock up to £9.7m in additional profit through product expansion, new customer acquisition, and cross-selling opportunities 

Read the full report here: The Total Economic Impact™ Of ClearBank Embedded Banking

PayCaptain is an innovative payroll platform serving over 300 corporate clients and processing salaries for more than 50,000 employees. As part of its mission to improve financial well-being, PayCaptain wanted to move beyond traditional payroll and offer employees more control over their earnings, including real-time payments and the ability to build savings directly from their salary. 

To achieve this, PayCaptain needed a scalable, regulated infrastructure that could support real-time salary payments while also enabling embedded savings accounts – all without building complex banking infrastructure in-house. 

By partnering with ClearBank, PayCaptain embedded both real-time payroll payments and FSCS-protected savings accounts directly into its platform. Employees can now receive their salary instantly and allocate a portion into interest-bearing savings accounts within the same app. 

“ClearBank was the natural choice to power our embedded savings service with their combination of resilience, scale and technology innovation.” – Simon Bocca, Chief Executive Officer, PayCaptain 

Read the full case study: PayCaptain and ClearBank partner to deliver real-time payroll payments and embedded savings accounts 

Embedded payments are becoming a core part of how financial institutions and brands build their products to meet modern customers’ expectations. But for many businesses, embedded payments are only the first step. 

That’s where choosing the right embedded payments partner early on makes a difference: with the right infrastructure in place, you can not only deliver better payment experiences but also expand into areas like interest-bearing savings and other embedded banking features without having to replatform later. 

With ClearBank, for example, you can embed payments directly into your product through a single API, with the option to expand your offering with FSCS-protected accounts further down the road. 

To learn more about how we can help you deliver scalable, high-performance payment experiences, get in touch.