When expense management is essential to your customers, but not core to your product, the challenge is deciding how to deliver it without falling into the build trap or compromising customer experience through a third-party marketplace.
Many product and technology leaders face the same dilemma: customers expect world-class expense management, yet building it internally slows progress, while marketplace apps create a fragmented experience you cannot fully control.
This decision often comes down to three paths: build it in-house, connect customers to third-party apps via a marketplace, or partner with a specialised tech vendor to embed the capability directly into your product.
Building gives you control, but demands extensive ongoing maintenance and resources. Marketplaces appear simple, but redirecting users to an external provider weakens the customer experience, adds friction, and limits your ability to own the experience.
Below, we break down the delivery options and what they mean for your product roadmap.
When extending your product with expense functionality, you typically face three options:
Building internally offers control, but comes at a high cost. Development cycles stretch, compliance work increases, and maintenance competes with your core roadmap. Over time, this leads to slower progress and growing technical debt.
Marketplace apps are quick to implement, but they introduce strategic drawbacks. Sending users to an external provider breaks the seamless flow of your product and reduces your control over the user journey. For a feature like expense management, that disconnect can erode trust and engagement.
Embedding expense management avoids both challenges. You deliver a fully branded, compliant solution without building it yourself and without redirecting users elsewhere. It stays within your product, under your brand, and becomes part of your native experience.
There are two main ways to embed expense management directly into your platform: via API or through a white-label delivery model. Both maintain a native, branded experience, but they support different product strategies.
An API-led setup lets you own the customer experience, while the underlying expense engine handles compliance, automation, and data processing.
Why it works:
This model suits teams that want to build the front-end themselves, maintain design consistency, and stay in control of the experience while outsourcing the complexity.
A white-label solution gives you a ready-to-launch, fully branded expense product with no development or operational overhead. It is the fastest way to add expense management to your offering.
Why it works:
White label is suited to teams with tight timelines, limited development capacity, or a roadmap that prioritises core features.
The decision between building in-house and partnering has significant implications for speed, cost, and long-term sustainability.
The equation becomes clear. Building increases overhead and slows innovation. Partnering unlocks speed, scale, and focus.
As pressure grows to deliver more features without expanding internal resources, embedded solutions offer a way to meet expectations while safeguarding your roadmap. Both API and white-label paths deliver a native-like expense experience under your brand, supported by an infrastructure you do not need to build or maintain.
Findity offers the two models for embedded expense management on one platform:
Build your own embedded expense product using our headless platform. You keep full UI control, while we manage compliance, data, and integrations.
Launch a fully branded, card-agnostic expense solution instantly. No development required, and time-to-market is reduced from months to weeks.
Both models can be combined and deliver the same outcome:
A fully branded expense solution that feels native to your product, powered by an AI-driven, card-agnostic and locally compliant platform built for scale.
If you are exploring how to extend your product with expense management, we can help you choose the right delivery model for your roadmap.
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