嵌入式金融如何推动企业价值并提高SaaS平台的倍数

INVESTMENT BANKING How Embedded Finance Drives EnterpriseValue and Increases Multiples for SaaSPlatforms Broader embedded finance monetization provides key financialadvantages, unlocks additional customer value and—as recentdata shows—drives valuation premiums. Embedded finance (sometimes called embedded fintech) is the integration offinancial services—e.g., payment acceptance, payment disbursement, businessfinancing, bank accounts, expense cards, payroll, and insurance—directly intosoftware applications or platforms. It advances the well-established strategyof integrated payments, with vertical SaaS platforms offering personalized andconvenient access to additional financial services within the applications wherecustomers are already engaged. While this more comprehensive and integrateduser experience has been shown to drive stronger growth, unit economics, andretention for SaaS platforms, the extent to which embedded finance impactsinvestor interest and valuations has remained an open question. Authors David Oliver+1 470 351 6929doliver@williamblair.com Jamie Hamilton+1 470 351 6928jhamilton@williamblair.com John Ivey+1 310 734 5804jivey@williamblair.com We can now address that question directly leveraging William Blair’s proprietarydata and extensive transaction experience advising leading SaaS platforms withembedded finance strategies.1That data is detailed in the following article,a collaboration with Stripe, a financial infrastructure company that providessoftware for accepting payments and embedding financial services. We alsoexplore embedded finance’s impact on several key performance indicators thatultimately drive value and provide guidance for SaaS platforms as they considerhow to prioritize embedded finance offerings. Greg South+1 415 248 5913gsouth@williamblair.com How to Implement Embedded Finance—and Its Impact on KeyPerformance Indicators SaaS platforms developing their embedded finance strategies have a lotto consider when it comes to determining actionability and prioritization.Embedded finance is especially well suited for end-markets with certaincharacteristics such as strong electronic payment adoption and high invoicevolume (see exhibit 1) and for those platforms serving small to midsizebusinesses, which are typically underbanked and lack dedicated IT departments. 1.Data exhibits represent median values across approximately 100 William Blair transactions from 2020 to present involving privately owned softwarecompanies in North America with enterprise values ranging from $100 million to $3 billion. Also important is the SaaS platforms’proximity to their customers’ end-consumers and vendors as wellas key money movements, bothinbound (e.g., consumer payments oraccounts receivable) and outbound(e.g., accounts payable, expensemanagement, and payroll). The bestopportunities are typically whereSaaS platforms are poweringworkflows critical to their customers’financial operations or, alternatively,their ability to engage the end-consumer. These “control points”allow for a relatively smooth transitionto multiproduct solutions enhancingplatform value for customers byaddressing their pain points withcustomized capabilities and animproved end-to-end user experience. The ability for embedded finance to enhance growth and other key performance indicators is clear. SaaS platformsemploying embedded finance strategies benefit from expanded total addressable market opportunities, increased averagerevenue per customer and customer lifetime value, improved attach rates with interrelated capabilities, and greateradoption of premium plans, among other benefits that ultimately drive enterprise value. Customer retention also canimprove through greater “stickiness” as embedded finance offers additional customer touchpoints and increased switchingcosts for end-users, while harnessing more data for customer personalization. These factors provide clear benefits for grossand net revenue retention (GRR/NRR), resulting in a material uplift when comparing the median figures for SaaS platformswith and without an embedded finance strategy (see exhibit 2). The uplift in GRR is even more noticeable when factoringin customer-level product adoption within a given SaaS platform (i.e., comparing the customer cohort adopting availableembedded finance solutions to the customer cohort that only uses the core software offering), as exhibit 3 shows. Moreover, once SaaS customers areon platform, revenue from embeddedfinance solutions pulls through to thebottom line with minimal incrementalcosts and high margins. Indeed, SaaSplatforms monetizing embeddedfinance solutions often not onlyexperience faster growth, but also seean uptick in EBITDA margin and, as aresult, Rule of 40 (see exhibit 4). How Embedded Finance Adoption Improves Valuations When considering embedded finance’s impact on valuations, SaaS platforms and their investors should resist conventionalthinking that software revenue is “more valuable” than tra