Building your own fintech is a process, with each stage bringing its own challenges and learnings. For some behind-the-scenes insights, we spoke with three platforms in the UK, each in a different chapter of their embedded finance journey: 

• Klipboard: Starting out with embedded payments
• Access Group: Professionalizing and scaling
• Epos Now: Going full-suite with embedded finance

Together, their experiences reveal four clear stages most platforms go through when building embedded finance capabilities. Here’s what they are:

1. Setting the intention (check your assumptions)

Most fintech journeys start with friction.

Klipboard supports over 50,000 SMBs, from builders’ merchants to rental businesses. What they saw was a mismatch: customers with complex workflows being offered generic, one-size-fits-all payments. Owning the payment experience felt obvious, but early assumptions didn’t always hold up. 

Here’s what worked to help Klipboard move forward with confidence:

• Talking to customers constantly
• Pressure-testing every assumption against real workflows
• Bringing in payments expertise early to avoid errors
• Choosing the right technology partners (and not trying to become a regulated payments business overnight)

Klipboard launched embedded payments in 2024, unlocking a wave of demand. Many customers responded with the same line: 

“Why didn’t you do this sooner?”

2. Turning payments into a core capability

The next stage is when payments go from “something we offer,” to “something we run well.”

Access Group is deep in this phase, serving more than 160,000 businesses.

They quickly learned that the responsibility of payments doesn’t fall under a single hire or team. It touches pricing, compliance, risk, reconciliation, support and reporting. Oversimplify it, and things break. Over-engineer it and nothing ships. As Group Strategic Payments Director, Sean Ashton put it: 

“People who don’t understand payments can oversimplify; people who do understand can complicate it. You need balance.”

Here’s what changed the game for Access Group: 

• Building cross-functional ownership across the business
• Designing payments around customer workflows, not revenue models
• Being realistic about how much work will be required
• Making the value so clear that customers default to using it

3. Embedding financial products

When you’re going full fintech, you don’t want to launch everything at once. Epos Now, for example, started with POS software, then embedded payments, and finally added capital, business accounts and cards.

Each evolution was driven by a real need. For example: 

• Payments: By operating a payment referral model, Epos Now had no control over the experience. They now have full end-to-end ownership. 
• Capital: Cash flow was a major challenge for their customers. Epos Now’s capital offering gives them quick access to funding, repayments linked to revenue, a bridge over slow seasons and the ability to invest when opportunities arise.
• Card issuing: Onboarding stalled because merchants didn’t have business bank accounts. By launching card issuing, they turned a multi-day, multi-provider process into a single onboarding flow. 

Epos Now’s golden rules: 

• No product enters the roadmap unless it solves a lived customer problem.
• Capital gives businesses breathing room to survive slow seasons.
• Accounts and cards remove onboarding dead ends.
• Payments are the key that unlock everything else.

4. Fintech as a system, not a feature

Across all three platforms, the same pattern shows up. Start with payments, build a deeper integration and embed financial services. 

Success hinges on: 

• Staying purpose-driven, meeting real customer needs
• Investing in the right skills early
• Building in sequence
• Expecting complexity and preparing for iteration

From payments to long-term value

There’s no single blueprint for building a fintech. But there is a pattern that works. Done right, embedded finance becomes part of how your platform creates long-term value.