If you’re looking for new avenues for boosting customer engagement and loyalty, or delivering new revenue streams, you’ve likely explored the world of embedded finance.  

However, with a broad range of options, from co-branded cards and current accounts to loans and insurance, assessing the services that work for your brand and make sense for your customers can be challenging. Once you have clarity on what you’d like to deliver, the complexity of turning that vision into reality follows.  

In this article, I'll explore the practical ways to identify opportunities to implement embedded accounts that can support enhanced customer loyalty and benefit your brand and customers, including: 

• What is embedded finance? 
• Embedded financial services: 5 benefits to brands 
• Embedded accounts: turning transactions into deeper relationships 
• Key criteria for choosing an embedded account partner 
• Why launch embedded accounts with ClearBank 
• Case study: How Chip reached £2.7bn in deposits through their instant access savings accounts in a partnership with ClearBank 

ClearBank is a UK and EU-authorised bank that offers a range of embedded account types to help enhance your offering. To embed accounts into your brand’s product and increase customer lifetime value, get in touch. 

Before we look at the details, here’s a quick recap of what embedded finance means.  

Broadly, the term refers to integrating financial services within nonfinancial platforms. As a result, it enables nonfinancial businesses to offer banking, lending, payments, or insurance services directly within their digital ecosystems. This eliminates the need for customers to engage with third-party financial services, creating a more seamless and efficient experience. 

According to McKinsey forecasts, the delivery of financial services by nonfinancial entities in Europe could surpass €100 billion by the end of the decade. You can read more about the types of embedded finance here. 

• Increase lifetime customer value: By offering targeted financial services, companies reduce churn rates and build longer, more valuable relationships. When brands meet customers’ financial needs in-platform, they can also derive revenue from those services. 
• Enhance brand engagement: By creating a frictionless, integrated experience that meets multiple needs, such as payments, loans, and insurance, within a single platform or ecosystem. This delivers greater convenience, reducing the need for customers to seek out alternative providers, making these services contextually relevant, and keeping customers interacting with the brand more frequently. 
• Support greater customer loyalty: Moving beyond basic loyalty schemes to experiences that resonate with your customers’ needs and preferences. That includes personalised financial solutions and the convenience of accessing tailored offerings. Increasingly, brands may create closed-loop environments, incentivising customers to hold funds and spend in-platform to deepen engagement. 
• Broaden behavioural insights: By generating rich data on spending and engagement patterns, you can use data-driven insights to deliver greater personalisation, engage earlier, and identify at-risk customers for tailored retention strategies. 
• Boost brand trust: Integrating financial services within a familiar platform your customers know and rely on can make them feel more secure and confident in their transactions, leading to stronger brand loyalty and repeat business. 

Imagine you had a savings or current account with an automotive brand. It can see you have funds and, as a result, offer you a bigger discount or approve a competitively priced loan in minutes. Without ever leaving the website or app, you could also purchase car insurance and manage any claims within that app. This last scenario is already a reality in the US with Tesla.   

But where could brands begin to see these benefits? 

Discover more about our accounts and payments powering corporates 

If someone offered you a way to have hundreds more touchpoints with your customers, and for them to experience your brand many times than they do today, you’d want to know how that’s possible. The answer may also surprise you: An embedded account delivered in partnership with a regulated bank. 

Moving to an already crowded market might seem counterintuitive advice. However, embedded accounts offer brands numerous customer touchpoints. 

Consider UK consumers’ average daily engagement with banking and finance apps, according to research by YouGov, on behalf of HSBC. Over eight in ten people (83%) check their banking or finance app weekly, with 38% checking their apps at least once daily. 25-34-year-olds show the greatest financial oversight, with 46% checking a banking or finance app at least once daily, compared with 36% of 18–24-year-olds. 

Accounts can hold a wealth of customer information, including how much they earn, what they buy and when, and regular outgoings such as direct debits for mortgages and utilities. A brand can derive rich information through AI and open banking-based tools, transforming transactions into actionable insight. 

Embedded accounts offer opportunities to deliver high-impact digital engagement features that drive deposits, whether in a current or savings account. Crucially, the insights brands derive can, where appropriate, be used to deliver tailored advice and support, helping customers manage their money more confidently and supporting improved financial well-being.   

Some brands may feel that building a customer base through an account product is too far removed from their core offering. And, in some cases, they could be right. This isn't about embedding accounts for its own sake but delivering a value-added proposition your customers will want and use. 

However, as you examine how to evolve your digital experiences for their core business, embedded accounts could be highly complementary and should be seriously considered.  

Finding a trusted partner who can provide the quality of service you require and meet your customers’ expectations is critical. But what should you look for in a potential partner for embedded accounts? 

Some criteria to consider include:   

• Payment performance: Your customers will expect real-time payments. You need to consider payment connectivity, the technical aspects of how a provider accesses the payment schemes, and their uptime. For example, while a scheme may run 24/7 365, a provider may not offer the same availability. You should also examine how your partner performs and communicates any updates, and monitors payment performance. 
• Deposit protection and regulatory status: Many ‘bank-like’ services can offer accounts and digital wallets to store funds, driven by the significant growth in the number and use of electronic money institutions (EMIs). However, this requires a thorough examination of where they hold customer funds, the protections in place, and who, if anyone, offers deposit protection, such as the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). 
• Stability and security: Your service provider should continually test, debug, and maintain its services to give you peace of mind that you can offer your customers a great payment experience. Providers should also embed information security in everyday business processes to ensure data is handled securely. 
• Client service and support: Your embedded accounts must operate efficiently, and your business must receive actionable analysis to optimise your customers’ experience. However, things can go wrong. If they do, your provider needs reactive and proactive support to help solve any issues. When assessing any potential provider, you should review its client relationship and support team. 
• Expertise and track record: There are a few ways to gauge whether your provider can deliver the embedded accounts experience you need, including references and case studies. A final aspect is a partner's stability and longevity. Can you be sure your provider has sufficient funding to operate and support your business for years? For example, do they have the long-term financial stability to invest in their products, services and client support? 

ClearBank is a UK-authorised, API-first, and fully licensed B2B bank with over £17 billion in client deposits held securely at the Bank of England. 

Our Embedded Banking proposition evolves the Banking as a Service (BaaS) model. While BaaS provides the basic infrastructure, embedded banking goes further, focusing on the contextual delivery of banking services and weaving them into a brand's experiences. That includes embedded accounts, both current accounts and savings accounts, and embedded payments. 

By building on top of ClearBank’s proven infrastructure, you can deliver compliant services and the associated features, such as FSCS protection on eligible deposits, without incurring the substantial cost of applying for a bank licence. You also don’t need to compromise the quality of your services by partnering with non-bank accounts and payments providers. 

Here are some reasons businesses like Tide, Revolut and Chip work with us: 

By partnering with ClearBank, you can offer customers current or savings accounts that pay competitive interest rates on balances and where eligible deposits are FSCS-protected up to £120,000 under the UK’s deposit guarantee scheme – all without becoming a bank yourself. 

This gives customers the confidence to hold more of their funds with your brand instead of moving them back to a traditional bank, increasing the assets now held in your ecosystem. 

Those balances also create a new recurring revenue stream: through ClearBank’s shared‑interest model, you can participate in the interest your customers earn on their deposits, boosting ROI. 

In fact, ClearBank’s embedded accounts are proven to deliver significant return on investment to our partners. 

Based on an analysis by the leading consultancy firm Forrester and its Total Economic Impact (TEI) model, our clients have benefited from: 

• Up to 90% payback in 10 months 
• Around 3% improvement in customer retention 
• Around 10% reduction in customer queries thanks to ClearBank’s resilient infrastructure, equating to a cost saving of almost £63,000 
• £9.7m profit via product expansion, cross-selling new services, and new customer acquisition 

You can read Forrester’s in-depth analysis here.  

As a brand, your onboarding flows, visuals, and communication style are vital to how customers perceive you. In fact, they’re often the reason they choose you over a traditional bank. It makes sense that you’d want to keep complete control over every customer interaction. 

Our embedded banking capabilities solve for exactly that. Your customers stay within your interface from the moment they sign up to their day-to-day account management. You’re in charge of the user experience, while ClearBank is disclosed as the underlying bank provider only where required for regulatory transparency. 

In the meantime, ClearBank is responsible for the regulated infrastructure behind the scenes, including payment scheme access (such as Faster Payments), regulatory licencing and oversight, and deposit handling. 

Every ClearBank partner must adhere to our minimum standards and cooperate with the bank’s oversight requirements on an ongoing basis. That ensures the robust governance and ownership expected of a bank, combined with the agility of launching new services in the BaaS model.  

Customers expect their funds to move quickly, from instant deposits and withdrawals to balances that update in near real time. 

Unlike legacy systems that rely on batch processing and manual processes, our API-first, cloud-native infrastructure enables: 

• Near real-time notifications of incoming and outgoing payments so that balances and transaction histories update as soon as money moves 
• 24/7/365 availability, without waiting for end-of-day or overnight cycles to see where funds stand 
• Faster and more accurate reconciliation, with live data that reduces manual work and gives you and your customers clearer financial visibility 

Chip is a UK‑based fintech helping customers grow their wealth through investments in real assets, diversified funds, and savings products. As the business scaled, it needed to move beyond an EMI model so that it could offer customers individual, FSCS‑protected, interest‑bearing accounts. As Corinna Lamberti, Chief Product Officer at Chip, said, “That’s what customers told us they wanted and needed, which led us to find a partner who could deliver it.” 

Chip first worked with ClearBank via agency banking before moving to an embedded banking model to deepen its account proposition.  

Through this structure, Chip has been able to offer instant access savings accounts that pay interest on deposits, serving more than 200,000 customers and reaching £2.7bn in deposits as reported in July 2024 – all while giving customers near real‑time balance updates on their accounts.  

Chip and ClearBank also launched the Flexible Cash ISA that allows customers to save up to the annual £20,000 tax‑free allowance within Chip’s interface. 

“Offering an ISA product is not the easiest thing,” Lamberti said. “We worked hand in hand with ClearBank to make that happen, pushing each other to ensure we delivered the best possible product.”  

Within the first five months, customers opened more than 85,000 Cash ISA accounts, with £1.3bn deposited. 

Read the full case study here: How Chip is enhancing the savings experience with ClearBank Embedded Banking 

With embedded accounts, you can move beyond one-off transactions: customers will hold more funds with you and share richer behavioural insights you can use to create tailored products and services.  

But embedded accounts aren’t a fit for every use case. It’s important to identify where financial services genuinely enhance your core proposition, choose account types that align with your goals, and partner with a provider that can deliver bank‑grade protection and real‑time capabilities without adding unnecessary complexity. 

As a fully licensed, API‑first bank, ClearBank provides FSCS‑eligible, interest‑bearing accounts, real‑time payment processing capabilities, and resilient infrastructure behind the scenes – while you stay in control of the brand experience and customer relationship. 

To learn more about how our embedded accounts can help enhance your offering, get in touch with our team.