Global revenue from embedded finance is projected to surge to $617 billion by 2031, up from $162.6 billion in 2026, as businesses increasingly integrate payments, banking, lending, insurance and investment services directly into digital platforms, according to new research by Juniper Research.
The forecast represents a 279 percent increase over the five-year period, with the business-to-business (B2B) segment projected to be the fastest-growing part of the market.
Juniper Research said B2B embedded finance revenue is expected to increase by 390 percent between 2026 and 2031, driven largely by the rapid digitisation of B2B payments and the growing demand for financial services to be delivered within non-financial business platforms.
The development signals a broadening of embedded finance beyond the consumer checkout experience, as businesses increasingly seek to incorporate financial capabilities directly into the software and platforms they already use.
Embedded finance refers to the integration of financial services into non-financial products and platforms through technologies such as application programming interfaces (APIs). Instead of customers leaving a platform to access a bank, lender, insurer or payment provider, financial services can be offered within the same digital experience.
Juniper said the market’s expansion will be supported by increased consumer access to e-commerce, regulatory standardisation around open finance and accelerating growth in B2B financial services.
The research covers five major segments — embedded payments, embedded banking, embedded lending, embedded investment and embedded insurance — and examines both B2C and B2B applications across the market.
B2B emerges as the new growth engine
The projected 390 percent increase in B2B embedded finance revenue stands out in Juniper’s latest assessment.
As companies digitise procurement, invoicing, payroll, marketplaces and other business processes, financial services are increasingly becoming part of the underlying software infrastructure rather than a separate product accessed through traditional financial institutions.
Juniper’s forecast therefore points to a market in which the next phase of embedded finance growth could increasingly be driven by transactions between businesses, rather than only by consumer purchases.
The research also identifies regulatory standardisation supporting open finance as an important driver of expansion. Open finance enables authorised third-party services to interact with financial data and infrastructure, creating opportunities for platforms to build financial products around existing customer relationships.
Competition shifts towards specialised platforms
Alongside its market forecast, Juniper released its 2026 Competitor Leaderboard for embedded finance vendors, assessing 26 companies on their capabilities and capacity.
The five companies highlighted by Juniper are Stripe, Adyen, Plaid, Marqeta and SoFi.
According to Manju Chhillar, research analyst at Juniper Research, the competitive landscape is increasingly being shaped by vertical specialisation.
“The leaders featured in our Competitor Leaderboard have demonstrated that vertical specialisation, rather than horizontal breadth, is what differentiates success in embedded finance,” Chhillar said.
She added that vendors are developing capabilities tailored to specific industries and use cases, arguing that depth of expertise will be increasingly important as fintech companies and non-financial platforms seek to integrate financial services.
The research identifies 26 embedded finance providers and assesses their positioning across the market. Juniper’s broader forecast database contains 154 tables and more than 80,000 data points covering users, transactions, transaction values and platform revenue.
Africa and Nigeria in the forecast
The implications extend to emerging markets, where digital platforms can provide financial services without requiring every customer interaction to take place through a traditional banking channel.
Juniper’s latest research includes Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Algeria and several Middle Eastern markets among the 71 countries covered by its Country Readiness Index. The index assesses market readiness and growth prospects for embedded finance and categorises countries as Focus, Growth, Developing or Saturated markets.
Nigeria has previously been identified by Juniper as a market with prospects for embedded payments, particularly as open banking and payments-as-a-platform models develop. In an earlier analysis, the research firm said the country’s regulatory framework for open banking could support the development of embedded financial services, while also pointing to infrastructure and implementation challenges.
The latest report, however, places the Nigerian market within a much broader global transformation in which financial services are increasingly becoming invisible layers inside commerce, business software and digital platforms.
For banks, fintechs, payment companies and technology providers, the expansion creates a potentially larger market for financial infrastructure delivered through APIs and Banking-as-a-Service models.
Juniper’s forecast suggests that by 2031, the central competition may no longer be only over who provides the financial product, but also over which platforms control the customer experience through which that financial product is delivered.
