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Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Embedded Fintech Meets AI: Vertical SaaS Platforms To Vertical Agents
The convergence of embedded fintech, artificial intelligence, and vertical SaaS platforms is transforming software from passive tools into proactive business partners. This shift enables platforms to anticipate user needs, optimize outcomes, and reshape strategies across sectors such as healthcare, logistics, education, and entertainment. Embedded financial services manage payments, loans, payroll, and accounting directly within software platforms, while AI enhances this foundation through predictive automation and real-time decision-making. Merging both allows SaaS products to become proactive solutions, powered in part by an accounting API that interprets financial data, triggers workflows, and provides actionable insights. These capabilities aren't just enhancing operational speed; they're redefining business logic itself. Companies are no longer simply hosting software; they're deploying intelligent systems that serve as revenue operators, compliance assistants, and growth strategists. The combination is particularly powerful in vertical SaaS, where products are built around specific workflows. When embedded finance and AI align within a tightly scoped use case like managing cash flow for independent restaurants or automating compliance for e-commerce sellers, the result is software that feels more like a partner than a product. Vertical SaaS platforms, designed for specific industries, have traditionally excelled at niche solutions. Today, their competitive advantage increasingly hinges on deeply embedded financial functionalities. Embedding payments, accounting, and lending streamlines operations and enhances user retention. According to A16Z, embedding financial services can boost SaaS revenue by two to five times per customer. Companies like Toast and Square have integrated financial services into their software platforms, simplifying operations for restaurants and barbershops, improving cash flow, accelerating payments, and reducing external dependencies. These integrations don't just enhance experience, they expand the platform's total addressable market by allowing it to participate in financial transactions. Take ServiceTitan, a field service management platform. By embedding financing options and payment processing directly into its interface, it has made it easier for home services companies to close jobs faster and get paid sooner, a critical value in a high-cash-flow, low-margin industry. Embedded fintech lays the groundwork, but it's artificial intelligence (AI) that truly brings modern SaaS platforms to life. Today's software solutions do more than just present data - they proactively recommend actions, optimize workflows, and autonomously execute tasks. By automating decision-making within embedded fintech, AI dramatically amplifies its effectiveness. Consequently, advanced SaaS platforms are evolving into vertical agents - autonomous software systems that independently manage and perform business tasks. This concept signifies a shift from passive, data-driven tools to dynamic platforms capable of real-time decision-making and action. Take, for example, the intersection of enterprise resource planning and accounting software. Platforms like CloseCore enable accounting teams to detect and resolve reconciliation variances with ease. These discrepancies may arise from uncleared cash transactions, missing invoices, bill credits, or inventory adjustments. By integrating general ledger data across multiple periods, the platform employs AI to identify related transactions and uncover the root causes of these variances. This level of analysis, executed at scale, would be nearly impossible for human accounting teams to achieve manually. 'AI is breaking down the walls between accounting and FP&A. The ability to generate various transactional data views and analyze them with AI on demand not only serves as a rigorous quality check for the latest reporting period but also surfaces critical variances for management reporting,' explains Andrew Li, CEO of CloseCore. AI's potential far exceeds basic automation. It is increasingly central to strategic initiatives such as revenue forecasting, anomaly detection, and customer segmentation. These advanced capabilities provide SaaS companies with a significant competitive edge - not just delivering tools but actionable insights and work products that drive business outcomes. Vertical agents surpass the limitations of traditional software by actively shaping operational decisions instead of merely monitoring data. Functioning like virtual employees, they take on responsibilities across finance, operations, and customer service, redefining how businesses operate. High-quality data forms the backbone of effective financial automation, especially within back-office operations such as reconciliation and compliance. Embedded accounting APIs are instrumental in achieving this by delivering real-time financial data, simplifying reconciliation processes, and providing actionable insights directly within platforms. One company addressing this growing demand is Open Ledger, an embedded accounting platform designed to power real-time financial automation. Its sophisticated ledger engine processes raw data from banks, card networks, and payment processors, performs continuous reconciliation, and offers prebuilt endpoints for accrual and cash-basis reporting, anomaly detection, and compliance with IFRS and GAAP. The company reports that its early adopters have achieved a 70% reduction in the time required to develop finance-related features, while simultaneously doubling payment attach rates. This increased efficiency stems from Open Ledger's AI-friendly, JSON-based, event-sourced data model, which enables large language models (LLMs) to instantly query, forecast, and act on financial events in real time. A prime example of this in action is Habitat Financial, a SaaS platform for music publishers. Habitat Financial utilizes Open Ledger's embedded accounting API to manage royalties and monitor expenses in real time. In industries like music, where royalty reconciliation has traditionally been a slow, months-long process, tools like these offer a much-needed solution, allowing businesses to centralize financial data and automate essential workflows with greater speed and accuracy. The precision and agility provided by embedded accounting tools not only improve operational efficiency but also minimize risk. Platforms that incorporate specialized accounting APIs can automate compliance processes and extract valuable insights at scale. By continuously updating in-platform financial intelligence, these tools help mitigate compliance errors, avoid missed payments, and eliminate financial blind spots. Pryce Yebesi, co-founder of Open Ledger, underscores the game-changing potential of embedded accounting: "Accounting data is much more than just a record-keeping tool; it serves as the foundation for intelligent business decisions. Embedding accounting features turns SaaS platforms into proactive financial partners.' The fusion of embedded fintech and AI is redefining what software can achieve. Modern vertical SaaS platforms are now expected to go beyond managing daily tasks - they must proactively guide, execute, and evolve alongside the businesses they serve. Today's CEOs are prioritizing software frameworks that emulate the responsibilities of CFOs, operational managers, and financial controllers, seamlessly integrating these functions into their products. This shift has heightened expectations: business leaders now seek smart automations that are both strategic and operational, empowering them to make data-driven decisions with confidence real time. Early movers in embedded accounting and intelligent AI enabled automation are providing forward-thinking business leaders with a powerful competitive advantage and a distinctive value proposition, enabling them to achieve both capital efficiency and sustainable growth.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Trump Administration Live Updates: President Kicks Off Gulf Tour in Saudi Arabia
An auction to dine with President Trump ended Monday, when he was readying to fly to the Middle East. President Trump and his business partners promoted it as the world's most 'EXCLUSIVE INVITATION' — a dinner with the president of the United States for the cryptocurrency investors who bought the most of his family's memecoin, called $TRUMP. But as the unusual contest came to a close on Monday, at least 17 of the 220 winning bidders had figured out a way to effectively outsmart the sponsors of the contest. These crypto investors had secured an invitation to the dinner even though their online wallets showed that they held zero of the memecoins, a type of novelty digital currency often based on a joke or mascot. That is because of a quirk in the rules: The winners were selected based on the average number of coins they held during the three weeks the contest was underway rather than their total at the end of bidding. Participants expected the price of the coin to crash as soon as the contest ended. And it did just that on Monday afternoon, plunging by 6.5 percent once the winners were announced. By that point, nearly 20 of the contestants had sold off or transferred all their $TRUMP holdings, according to an analysis by The New York Times. These traders had managed to benefit from the surge in price driven by the contest's promotion and still secure a seat at the dinner, set for May 22 at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. That was not the plan. Mr. Trump and his partners, who control 800 million of the coins, stood to benefit if the price stayed high. So Mr. Trump had been urging people to buy the coins throughout the auction period, and his partners encouraged investors to keep holding them even after it ended. The trading frenzy started on April 23, when a website associated with Mr. Trump's coin announced the contest. The site said that Mr. Trump would attend a dinner with the coin's top 220 holders, as well an 'Exclusive Reception' with the top 25, who would also win a White House tour the next day. An arcade-style leaderboard tracked the rankings, allowing the crypto investors to see what they had to spend to make the cut. The competition set off a surge of trading activity, as investors vied for a chance to meet with Mr. Trump and, in some cases, use that access to push for policies that would benefit the crypto industry. But the contest was also an opportunity for rapid profit-taking by sophisticated traders. Image 'The White House and President Trump are selling access to the government and himself for personal profit,' Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said. Credit... Eric Lee/The New York Times One buyer purchased $2.2 million worth of the $TRUMP coin in early April, a couple of weeks before the contest started. By last Thursday, the account appeared to have sold it all, pocketing $957,779.25 on the flip. (The buyers were identified only by their chosen nicknames. This buyer was called 'Noah.') But because that buyer's account had so many coins early in the process, it was ranked 25th on the leaderboard, meaning whoever controls it should secure a dinner seat, as well as the White House tour. The contest has drawn criticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as some ethics lawyers, who called it a corrupt moneymaking grab by Mr. Trump. 'I could never have imagined any leader of the United States engaging in this kind of grift,' Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview on Monday. 'The White House and President Trump are selling access to the government and himself for personal profit.' Particularly disturbing, he said, is that most of the contest winners remain anonymous and that many of them, based on the exchanges they used to purchase the coins, appear to be from overseas, while others have said publicly that they bought in to try to influence U.S. policies. Mr. Merkley has introduced a bill that would ban any president, vice president or senior executive branch official and their family members from profiting from a crypto sale. He has also asked the Office of Government Ethics to investigate Mr. Trump's role in the $TRUMP venture. A White House spokesman did not respond on Monday to a request for comment on the contest or whether the White House tour would take place as planned. Last week, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind and that he did not have a conflict of interest. Overall, the winners of the contest held $182 million worth of the $TRUMP coins at the time the contest closed. They had spent $191 million to buy those coins, meaning that, in aggregate, the winners had lost more money on the purchases than they had gained, according to an analysis of public transaction data by The Times. This is consistent with trading data that shows that most buyers of the coin since it was first introduced in January have lost money — a total of $3.9 billion, according to an analysis by Inca Digital, a crypto data firm. Whether traders make or lose money, the Trump family and its partners get a transaction fee each time the coins change hands, earning at least $320 million since $TRUMP went on sale in January, according to an estimate by Chainalysis, an industry data analyst. On Monday, the contest's organizers seemed eager to stop the sell-off, presumably aware of the possibility that even more of the dinner guests might dump their coins now that the competition has ended. In a post on X, the official account promoting the memecoin said that anyone who held onto their $TRUMP stash between now and the dinner would be rewarded with a 'TRUMP DIAMOND HAND' nonfungible token — a type of digital collectible known as an NFT. The account also announced that the coin's holders would soon start earning 'rewards points,' without explaining how points would be distributed or what they would be used for. By Monday evening, the price of the $TRUMP coin had inched up once again.
