Embedded Banking & Payments
Wethos is Vertical SaaS with pricing intelligence, built to help over 100,000 SMBs win bigger clients and scale. The platform helps customers price complex projects quickly, invoice their clients, get paid and pay others, all in one place.
It's two days before taxes are due and you just woke up. You're a consultant that took on a ton of projects this year, and the moment you've been dreading has finally arrived: time to reconcile. Throughout the year you got paid in a myriad of different ways, from Paypal to Venmo to Direct deposit, and your transactions are a whole mess. So you log into your bank account, panic, immediately file for an extension, and kick that awful can right back down the road.
PROBLEM
Fragmented payments cause chaos
For a decade, freelancers got paid through so many different tools that were all connected to their bank account. Every payout landed in their bank account as "PayPal deposit" or "Venmo transfer" with no invoice number, no client name, and no link back to the work that earned it. Freelancers were left getting hit with high transaction fees and reconstructing their own business at tax time.
SOLUTION
Banking 🤝 payments all in one place
Powered by Unit, we enabled freelancers open a business bank account, send invoices, accept payments, and automatically reconcile project income in one workflow. Because every invoice got created inside a specific project, and every payment against it ran through the same bank account instead of a third party wallet, the transaction record could inherit the client, the project, and the invoice number automatically. A freelancer never had to go dig through a PayPal history and guess which deposit matched which invoice, since the system already knew.
Set up a business bank account right from within Wethos
Users can complete KYC and open a real bank account and debit card with just a phone number and SSN, all from within our platform.
Invoices that automatically reconcile your transactions
One transaction record held everything a freelancer used to piece together by hand: client, project, invoice number, payment type, fees, net total.
Easily track cash flow and profitability across projects
Dedicated tables to track payments, reconcile transactions, mark invoices as paid, as well as project-level views
RESULTS
6x retention and $1.5M processed in 6 months
My role in this
I led the strategic decision to implement BaaS for customers, and designed the KYC onboarding flow, the invoice payment experience, and the embedded payments account experience. I also had a heavy hand leading the negotiations with our banking partner, Unit, including navigating rates, margins, compliance.
From a revenue standpoint, I was the final decision maker on how payments would fit into our subscription tiers. We knew there was billions if not trillions of volume out there, so payments stayed in the free tier with fees flexing by volume rather than gating the feature itself.
Something I'd do differently
We figured that if we made it effortless for a freelancer to invoice and get paid, they'd also control how that payment happened. Invoices were in the thousands, so we assumed bank transfers (low fees) would be enough for our beta. But how a client pays is really a client-facing decision, and plenty of clients wanted to pay by card or through their own systems no matter what we'd built for the freelancer's side. For a while we didn't support that, so freelancers would get pushed right back into the fragmented, unreconciled payment flows the whole feature was supposed to solve. We quickly followed up with rolling out card payments which nearly doubled the volume being processed through the platform.
If I had a magical do-over, I would make flexibility and ease of plugging existing payment methods into our systems a higher priority.
