Why Creator Platforms Need Embedded Finance: By Jelle Van Schaick

Finextra

12-05-2025

The creator economy is growing fast. What was a $100 billion market in 2023 has more than doubled, and it's not slowing down. But if you look under the hood, it becomes clear that the infrastructure supporting this boom is lopsided. Most of the energy and investment has gone into the front-end — platforms, audience tools, content monetisation. The back-end, the financial stack, is still trailing behind.
Creators today are building brands and businesses on top of fragmented, outdated financial tools. Their workflows are digital, global and fast-moving. Their financial infrastructure is none of those things. That's where embedded finance comes in.
The Financial Stack Isn't Built for Creators
Creators don't earn like traditional businesses. Income is irregular and comes from multiple sources: ad revenue, sponsorships, subscriptions, live streams, tips, merch, affiliate sales. The revenue graph looks more like a heartbeat monitor than a salary slip.
Add to that the complexity of cross-border income and you start to see why standard financial tools don't work. Traditional banks see unpredictability and label it as risk. But fintech can take that same volatility and build programmatic control around it.
The core issue is that financial services for creators haven't been built at the workflow level. Tools aren't integrated into where creators already operate. They're tacked on, bolted in or left entirely to third parties. The result is friction, delays, and missed opportunities.
Embedded Finance as the Infrastructure Layer
What creators need isn't a better bank account. They need a financial system that is natively integrated with their workflow, built into the platforms they already use.
Embedded banking enables this by offering modular, API-based financial services that can be embedded directly into creator platforms. Done right, it shifts the financial experience from a separate, friction-heavy process into something contextual and seamless.
This is exactly the kind of shift that vertical ERPs (VERPs) have unlocked in other industries; embedding payments, compliance, and finance tools into operational workflows.
The benefits for creators are immediate:
Revenue can be received and spent without delay
Tax and compliance can be automated in the background
Financial visibility improves as earnings are consolidated across sources
Creators gain control without becoming financial experts
This kind of vertical integration isn't just smoother. It changes the economics. Tips can be spent instantly. Revenue can be visualised in one place. And everything is compliant by default, not by afterthought.
What the Next Wave of Fintech Needs to Build
Embedded finance unlocks an entirely new set of possibilities for creator platforms. Here are a few that fintechs should be building for right now.
1. Income dashboards with context
Creators need to see where their money comes from and what it means. How much is recurring? What's taxable? What's likely to drop off next month? A dashboard that just shows balances isn't enough. It needs to surface insight.
2. Credit based on engagement, not FICO
Traditional credit models don't work here. But a creator with 100,000 engaged followers has built a business with real earning potential. That signal can be underwritten. Embedded finance lets platforms use engagement and transaction data to create alternative credit scoring models.
3. Embedded tax and financial services
Creators rarely have a finance team. But they still need help with taxes, budgeting, and compliance. Financial education and services should be native to the platform, not something they're expected to find elsewhere. A simple tax assistant that handles cross-border income, VAT, or quarterly filings would add huge value.
4. Dynamic payouts and income smoothing
With embedded banking, platforms can offer customisable payout logic. Daily, weekly, after a set threshold. Even better, they can offer income smoothing — giving creators more stability without debt, using predictive modelling and reserves. This kind of workflow-first thinking is critical to making financial services genuinely useful.
5. Risk-adjusted lending and advances
By owning the financial data and workflows, platforms can offer low-risk advances or micro-loans based on platform history, not just banking history. This is a major unlock for creators looking to scale.
The Real Opportunity: Infrastructure, Not Interfaces
The future of the creator economy hinges on infrastructure. It's not just about building better tools for content creation, but about enabling the systems that handle the financial complexity behind a growing creator business.
Fintech is in a prime position to deliver that foundation. The challenge is to move beyond simple payments and address the entire workflow. Embedded finance provides a clear model for doing this, offering financial services that are integrated, flexible and nearly invisible to the end user.
For platforms that take this approach, the upside is significant. For creators, it means moving from reactive survival to proactive growth.