WEX President Says APIs Move Embedded Finance Into B2B Mainstream

The consumerization of B2B payments has become a driving force in the industry. At its center sits the transition of embedded finance from experiment to maturity.

“It used to be sort of a theme or a dream … and now a few years into it, we no longer need big teams of developers or big budgets to enable embedded finance into a platform,” Eric Frankovic, president of corporate payments at WEX, told PYMNTS.

One of the biggest remaining inhibitors to adoption is psychological rather than technical, Frankovic said. Business leaders still carry institutional memory of painful enterprise software transitions. The comparison to ERP deployments includes long timelines, deep integrations, massive internal coordination and irreversible commitment.

But “embedded payments are nothing like that,” Frankovic said.

For years, embedded finance seemed inevitable but distant, a capability reserved for tech giants or FinTech disruptors with armies of engineers. Now, however, the technology has evolved from a speculative concept into a foundation of business infrastructure.

The distance between financial service providers and business platforms has collapsed through technology, APIs and embedded compliance.

Consumerization of B2B Payments

Historically, B2B workflows required trade-offs, including security over speed, accuracy over ease, and legacy stability over innovation. But after years of settling for clunky, batch-based, multistep, human-assisted processes, business users are demanding consumer-grade ease, speed and visibility.

“We call it the Amazon effect,” Frankovic said. “We want that same feeling in B2B payments. … We’ve had to sacrifice [user experience] for years, and now, thanks to embedded finance, I don’t think we have to anymore.”

This consumerization of business payments is not merely aesthetic. It is about eliminating operational drag. From invoice management to transaction authorization and settlement, processes that were once linear and administrative are becoming instant and automated. The reduction of friction increases product stickiness, creates new monetization opportunities and shifts the competitive frontier.

“Embedded finance has become a fairly straightforward, simple process to implement,” Frankovic said, adding that companies can adopt incrementally. “You don’t have to do it all at once. You can dance into this slowly … implement a few pieces of the puzzle, get comfortable … and then go deeper.”

Embedded finance becomes an upgrade path, not a replacement project, and that points to one of the most consequential shifts across embedded finance: the need to build these solutions internally.

“There was a time … thinking, ‘Oh, we have engineers that are so smart and they could really just kind of hack this together.’ … That era is over,” Frankovic said.

What has emerged are white-label, outsourced platforms that help accelerate adoption.

“Use a provider like WEX that can be a seamless back end,” he said. “There’s a whole ancillary arm of revenue that you can add in just by monetizing payments in a more sophisticated way.”

APIs as the New Standard

At the heart of this embedded finance architecture is the humble API. Rather than becoming burdened by the embedded platform’s complexity, developers become free to focus on product innovation while API endpoints orchestrate regulated, secure and scalable financial functions.

“APIs have changed the game clearly,” Frankovic said. “They’re less time-consuming. They’re simpler and straightforward.”

APIs mark a structural turning point in how financial infrastructure is deployed.

“They take the burden really off of the developers,” he said. “You can just sort of plug in, for lack of a better term, and let the APIs do the heavy lifting.”

API-driven implementation shrinks roadmaps, which is important, he said. What once required “weeks and months and even years … you can do … in really short order.”

At the same time, artificial intelligence fraud has become one of the most urgent catalysts for adopting embedded, platform-level payment solutions. Embedded finance, when supported by dedicated providers, builds robust compliance and anti-fraud protections directly into workflows, layers that are difficult for most companies to replicate alone.

“The dawn of AI has increased the velocity with which we’re seeing fraudsters attack companies of all kinds,” Frankovic said.

As he put it, embedded finance is now “a fairly straightforward, simple process.” The companies that treat it as such could be the ones shaping the next generation of B2B financial experience.

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