This conversation is part of a three-part series about Embedded Finance that Jane Podbelskaya and I are launching leading up to Embedify 2026, our summit for vertical SaaS leaders on October 13 in Lehi, Utah.
Embedded finance sounds simple until you try to scale it. I sit down with Jane, Founder of Charge Forward and a former software engineer turned VC and fintech investor, to unpack the real drivers behind embedded finance adoption in vertical SaaS. The big theme is organizational readiness: if you cannot name the customer problem, the workflow moment, and the senior leader who owns the business, payments or lending will stall no matter how clean the integration looks.
We also dig into what a “virtual team” looks like in practice. Rather than hiring a massive new department, the winners pull together product, engineering, finance, sales, marketing, customer success, support, legal, and a clear owner to run partner oversight. Jane explains why embedded finance changes go-to-market, why support needs new playbooks for issues like failed payments and fraud, and why leadership must treat this as a new P&L mindset inside the existing SaaS motion.
On the technology side, we move past the API checklist and talk about what you need after launch: ledgering, reconciliation, error visibility, shared support workflows with your embedded finance vendor, and an operating system that helps you act on customer signals. Finally, we cover the metrics operators and investors watch most, from addressable GMV and adoption to share of wallet, take rate, and retention lift.
If you’re building embedded payments, embedded lending, or insurance inside vertical SaaS, you don’t want to miss this episode.
