When most people think about embedded finance, they imagine simple payment buttons, API-driven onboarding, and fast global payouts. But few operators have seen what actually happens when a company tries to scale financial operations across borders.
One of the people who has witnessed this shift up close is Zack Shooter, a fintech operator who spent five years helping build Deel’s global financial infrastructure as the company expanded into more than 100 countries. His work exposed a growing truth across the industry. Businesses everywhere are evolving into fintech companies, whether they intend to or not, yet the infrastructure required to support that evolution is not keeping pace.
Industry research reflects the same pattern. As companies expand, many now rely on multiple payment gateways rather than a single provider because no player offers consistent coverage across geographies and payment methods. For Zack, this was not an abstract trend. It was the daily operational reality of building one of the fastest-scaling global fintech stacks of the last decade.
The Global Fintech Stack Looks Simple From the Outside. Zack Saw How Fragile It Really Is.
When Deel began its international expansion, the assumption was that a global payment provider could abstract most of the complexity. Zack quickly learned that was not the case.
As the team onboarded users across continents, the cracks appeared. A provider that performed smoothly in Europe would struggle in Latin America. Settlement times that worked well in the United States broke down in Asia. Compliance rules shifted from market to market. Downstream banking partners introduced unpredictable behavior that no aggregator could fully conceal.
What looked like a unified global API was actually a patchwork of local constraints and dependencies. Zack and his team realized that there was no such thing as one provider that could power a global financial product. There were only rails, banks, and processors that each behaved differently depending on the region.
Integration Became One of the Defining Challenges of Global Scale
Integration is often treated as a technical task. Zack’s experience proved otherwise. At Deel, every integration required deep involvement from engineering, product, compliance, and operations teams.
“Every provider behaves differently. Their onboarding, their documentation, their payout logic, their reconciliation files, and even their error codes all change from region to region. Nothing is standardized. You cannot assume anything will work the same way twice, and you only discover the real differences once you are deep into integration.”
Product teams had to allocate meaningful time to map flows, coordinate across departments, and build logic that accounted for dozens of edge cases. Testing was equally demanding. Sandbox environments could not replicate real corridors, so Zack’s team had to validate routing, FX handling, settlement timing, and error conditions with controlled live volumes.
Integration slowed feature delivery but accelerated understanding. It forced the team to learn how global money movement truly behaved, not how it was marketed.
For many companies building financial features today, this integration burden comes as a surprise. For Zack, it became an early indicator that the industry was heading toward a structural bottleneck.
Relying on Other Companies’ Licenses Created Another Layer of Hidden Risk
One of the most revealing insights Zack gained at Deel was the fragility of depending on another company’s regulatory perimeter.
Each time Deel used an external provider, the company became subject to licensing constraints and compliance decisions made by someone else. Providers could change risk thresholds, restrict use cases, update onboarding requirements, or lose banking relationships. Any shift could disrupt entire payment flows overnight.
As Deel scaled, Zack saw clearly that this dependency was not sustainable for companies with global ambitions. Many businesses face the same crossroads today. They either continue relying on external licensing structures with limited flexibility or begin pursuing licenses themselves and take ownership of their financial architecture.
This shift transforms a business from “using fintech” to effectively becoming a fintech company in its own right.
Why Companies Are Now Building Their Own Fintech Stack
The move toward building rather than renting financial infrastructure is accelerating. Zack attributes this shift to several consistent motivations:
Control of customer experience
Financial touchpoints are no longer utilities. They are core product features that shape trust and retention.
Control of economics
Owning routing, FX flows, and settlement mechanics can significantly improve margins.
Control of reliability
Businesses want protection from provider outages and changing policies that can disrupt critical user journeys.
Control of global expansion
Companies are no longer willing to wait for a single provider’s roadmap before entering new markets.
Control of compliance
At scale, relying exclusively on another company’s regulatory perimeter limits what a business can build.
These motivations point to the same conclusion Zack reached inside Deel. Companies grow into fintech companies because they have no choice.
The Infrastructure Gap Standing in the Way
Despite growing interest in building custom financial stacks, most companies lack the infrastructure that global fintech leaders have developed internally over the years. Zack identifies several missing layers:
“When companies try to build their own financial stack, they quickly discover how many pieces are missing. They have no structured way to compare providers, no visibility into real pricing, no monitoring across multiple PSPs, no routing intelligence, no standardized contract data, and no system to manage compliance or integration over time. All of the operational glue that global fintechs build internally does not exist for everyone else.”
This gap slows companies down and prevents them from building with confidence. Zack observed this friction repeatedly while helping Deel scale into new regions.
Where the Industry Is Heading
The next era of fintech will not be defined by single-provider dependency. Zack believes it will revolve around companies assembling their own financial architecture across multiple rails, partners, and licensing models.
“People underestimate how much infrastructure you need before you can operate a modern financial stack. There is no framework for comparing providers, no visibility into actual economics, no tooling for multi-PSP oversight, no routing analytics, and no automated compliance or contract management. These are systems mature fintechs spend years building, yet most companies are expected to operate without them.”
The underlying theme is control. Businesses want ownership of their financial systems rather than relying entirely on third-party abstractions.
Why Zack Left Deel
After years of operating at the intersection of global payments, licensing, compliance, and product scalability, Zack saw a clear pattern. The complexity was increasing. The dependency on other companies’ licenses was becoming restrictive. The integration burden was rising. And the infrastructure required to manage these challenges did not exist.
What began as operational challenges inside one company revealed itself as a universal industry problem. Businesses everywhere were encountering the same fragmentation, the same integration pains, and the same blind spots in economics and compliance.
At the same time, Zack saw the early outlines of a future where more financial operations would be automated, and where AI systems would initiate transactions on behalf of businesses. That future requires stronger infrastructure and more governance than the market currently provides.
Zack left Deel with the intention of solving this emerging problem for the next generation of global companies. His work now focuses on building the foundational infrastructure that businesses and AI-driven systems will require in the years ahead.
