Hi, I’m Julie VerHage-Greenberg with This Week in Fintech, along with Emmalyn Shaw, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Flourish Ventures.

Welcome back to our podcast and to this special series, The Architects, where we spotlight the people and ideas reshaping the U.S. financial ecosystem. Today we’re diving into one of fintech’s most dynamic frontiers: embedded finance – how everyday software platforms are becoming financial powerhouses.

We’re joined by two people at the heart of that transformation: Itai Damti, Co-Founder and CEO of Unit, a leading embedded finance platform, and Amit Sagiv, Co-Head of Payments and Financial Services at Wix.

Together, they’re making it possible for millions of businesses to access banking, payments, and lending inside the tools they already use. In this conversation, we’ll explore what inspired them to take on this challenge, how mission and talent drive execution, how technology and AI set them apart, and what kind of ROI is convincing software platforms to fully embrace fintech.

Let’s dive in.

🎧 Episode Summary: Embedded Finance, Wix Checking & the Future of AI-Powered Money

[00:00 – 05:30] Behind the Scenes & Getting Set UpThe episode opens with some fun pre-show banter: name checks for Itai and Amit, jokes about mispronunciations, and a quick scramble to get the right script and prep doc in front of everyone. You also get a peek into the production process – multiple docs (newsletter, transcript, keywords) and the realities of juggling many email accounts across different roles. The group confirms timing, guardrails (no specific numbers, no Unit investment details), and sensitivities around how Wix’s capital product is described.

[08:10 – 12:30] Series Setup & Guest IntrosJulie formally kicks off The Architects series, explaining that it’s co-created with Flourish to spotlight people reshaping the U.S. financial ecosystem. Emmalyn frames the episode around embedded finance – “how everyday platforms are becoming financial powerhouses” – and introduces Itai from Unit and Amit from Wix. Julie underscores the impact: together they’re enabling millions of businesses to access banking, payments, and lending inside software platforms, then invites both guests to share their backgrounds.

[10:08 – 15:45] Unit’s Origin Story & The Embedded Finance “Tsunami”Itai walks through why he started Unit around 2018–2019. He contrasts Fintech 1.0 (Chime, LendingClub, Venmo and hundreds of challengers trying to beat incumbents head-on) with a new wave of software-plus-money companies like Toast, Shopify, Uber, Lyft, and Gusto.Key points:

• These platforms have distribution, data, and trust, giving them a real right to win in financial services.
• But the tooling “sucked” – early fintechs had to stitch together 15–25 vendors for KYC, ledgers, issuing, money movement, statements, fraud, etc.
• Unit’s thesis: if you want the next thousand software companies to offer money services, you need a plug-and-play core system that connects to the Fed on one side and modern APIs/UI on the other.He outlines how Unit has since expanded into credit primitives, international payments, and checks, while keeping the core thesis constant: help companies like Wix become meaningful financial services providers over the next 20 years.

[15:45 – 19:30] From Building Blocks to “Ready to Launch”Itai explains Unit V1 as a “system of Legos”:

• Platforms can assemble deposit accounts, credit accounts, cards, and other primitives to build custom financial experiences.
• Companies like Wix act as “power users,” using deposit-account Legos to create tailored flows (e.g., main cash vs tax vs payroll buckets, plus selective credit cards for a subset of users).

Over time, Unit noticed that even after compressing cost/effort by 80–90%, many qualified platforms still lacked the appetite to build UI, set financial terms, manage support, and run fraud/risk themselves. That led to Ready to Launch – a plug-and-play money hub for small businesses with savings, spend, and capital built in, delivered via a single line of code. Itai argues that most of the next 500 buyers will prefer this more opinionated, fully managed entry point.

[19:30 – 24:30] Why Wix Built Checking & Instant Access to EarningsAmit explains the pain he heard repeatedly from Wix merchants:

• “Money in” (accepting payments) is relatively straightforward; money management and access to capital are hard.
• Merchants juggle multiple terminals (Wix, Stripe, PayPal, QuickBooks, their bank) that don’t talk to each other.
• During COVID, the chaos of mixed personal/business finances made applying for PPP loans nearly impossible for many.

Wix decided to lean into these gaps and partner with Unit to build Wix Checking and instant access to earnings. Key outcomes:

• Merchants can spend revenue immediately after a sale if risk checks pass.
• That “couple of days” delay in payouts, which can be existential for small merchants, gets removed.
• The deeper value merchants report is transparency – a clearer view of their business, not just faster money.

Itai builds on this with the idea of “giving money meaning”: instead of a random +$1,000 deposit in a Chase account, merchants can see which products or services drove that revenue and whether it’s repeatable or one-off, and similarly give context to expenses.

[24:30 – 33:30] Technical & Design Challenges of Embedded Finance at ScaleEmmalyn asks about the hardest technical problems in embedding financial services into Wix. Amit highlights:

• The need to combine technology, operations, and risk in a way that scales to hundreds of thousands of users across many business types and geos.
• Programmatic onboarding: moving already-KYC’d payments users into checking with minimal friction, without creating data gaps or funnel drop-off.
• Keeping experiences smooth while still bringing Wix’s deep user data into risk models and instant payout decisions, including robust pre-approvals so merchants aren’t promised something and then declined.

Itai explains how Unit’s architecture supports this:

• Over time, Unit moved from relying on bank-specific connectivity to being directly connected to the Federal Reserve for 100% of ACH, checks, wires, etc., enabling faster iteration and more control.
• Unit focuses on completeness, not just “happy path” flows: statements, 2FA for wires, disputes, customer-support tooling, dashboards, and configurable user cohorts (e.g., VIP tiers with different limits, fees, and rewards toggled via a single API call).
• This lets banks remain “the bank” and platforms remain “the platform,” while Unit bridges technical gaps.

[33:30 – 41:45] AI, Agents & Operational Automation at Wix and UnitEmmalyn pivots to AI. Amit stresses they’ve been building with AI since 2016:

• Compliance & catalog screening: AI agents scan product catalogs to ensure they comply with payment and regulatory rules (e.g., age-restricted goods, banned ingredients) and quietly remove problematic items while educating merchants instead of just shutting them down.
• Operational risk: AI models continuously evaluate risk and keep human intervention to a minimum.
• Support & UX: AI chat agents handle “Where is my payout?” and other routine questions, reducing support load while educating merchants.
• The recent acquisition of Base 44 enables non-technical creators to build advanced apps and AI skills, with money processing and financial flows baked into that future.

Itai shares that Unit uses Base 44 internally to manage product roadmaps and communication, then lays out his framework for AI and money:

• AI “reading” money: answering queries like “How much did I pay in fees last year?”, “How much did I spend on marketing and what was the ROI?”, or “How much revenue will I lose if this product stays removed?” by connecting transaction, business, and operational data.
• AI “writing” money: agents actually spending or moving funds on behalf of merchants (e.g., managing ad budgets across platforms) – a powerful but still nascent frontier.

[41:45 – 50:30] Trust, Agentic Spend & the Cashflow Reality for SMBsJulie notes she’d personally trust “read” use cases before letting an agent “write” (spend) money. Amit agrees that adoption will be gradual but sees strong demand, especially from SMBs that aren’t marketers and struggle with budgeting:

• Merchants might start by giving an agent a small marketing budget; if results are good, the trust and budgets grow.
• The same trust dynamic applies to read-type questions – if the numbers are wrong, the agent loses credibility quickly.

He argues that stablecoins and programmable money will help constrain and de-risk agentic spend (e.g., dollars explicitly earmarked for marketing only). As natural-language instructions (“For the next month, allocate $50 to X”) map to complex underlying transaction logic, he expects embedded platforms to become the place where read + write capabilities converge.

Itai zooms back to basics: most SMB problems are still about simple, connected visibility:

• Revenue, cash, and payroll all live in different systems.
• Just bringing that data together into a single cashflow view – “Can I afford this marketing spend, knowing I have a big vendor payment in eight days?” – is a huge step-change.Unit often sits at the intersection of external bank accounts, platform balances, and scheduled payables, giving them a near-360 view they can visualize and build actions around.

[51:30 – End] What’s Moved Faster in Fintech – and What Hasn’tThe conversation closes with a forward-looking reflection:

• Amit:
  • COVID massively accelerated online commerce and forced even reluctant merchants online, though some have since drifted back toward more offline models.
  • He’s most surprised by how quickly his own kids (5, 10, 12) adopted ChatGPT – they don’t think in terms of “search,” only chat.
• Itai:
  • On the positive side, he’s impressed by the scale and security of the last 15 years of fintech – from Chime and Mercury to Relay, Ramp, and beyond, plus Unit’s own 18M daily API calls – with remarkably few catastrophic fraud incidents.
  • On the slower side, checks and non-digital payments are still everywhere; roughly half of small businesses still touch checks, so modern platforms can’t ignore that reality if they want to offer complete solutions.