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Current examples

In March 2026, Buhl Data Service, the maker of WISO Steuer, founded its own subsidiary for financial services: Buhl Financial Service GmbH. The stated purpose of this new company is the brokerage of insurance and financial services of all kinds, including participation in the administration and fulfillment of insurance contracts.1 According to the register entry, the articles of association were signed on 4 March 2026 and the entry in the commercial register at the Siegen local court was made on 19 March 2026.1

Fitting this development, Buhl is already advertising an insurance service that compares policies from more than 300 insurers, reviews existing contracts and acts as an insurance broker.2

Looking at the market around financial services, a pattern emerges. What Buhl is building with insurance is happening in several categories at the same time, in different forms and implementations, but broadly with a shared thesis. There is no shortage of examples:

Lexware integrates banking directly into its accounting software. The Lexware business account is not a standalone product; it is booked together with Lexware Office. Account movements can therefore flow into the books automatically. Banking and accounting no longer happen separately but are handled together by one provider.3

Finanzguru takes the opposite route: starting from bank data aggregation, the app systematically extends its functionality with contract reviews, insurance services and financial analysis. Here, too, several services merge into one central platform for personal finances.4

Likewise CLARK. The company started out as an insurance broker and is extending its offering with products around tax and retirement planning. In Switzerland, CLARK even positions itself explicitly as a “partner for tax, insurance and finance”. Exactly in the direction of a single place for a variety of financial services, as can be observed with the other providers as well.5

All of these examples underline an interesting dynamic, which raises the following question.

Do financial services providers with a one-dimensional product offering have a future?

In the past, financial services providers were predominantly one-dimensional. Every product, whether an account, insurance, a loan, tax or a pension, had its own provider, its own customer relationship and its own point of contact. Consumers used their house bank for the savings account, a separate provider for the loan, and yet another specialist for insurance. For the customer this meant fragmented information and many contacts in what is really one connected context. Anyone who wanted a complete overview of their financial situation, and of their planning in particular, had to assemble the puzzle of bank statements, insurance policies, loans and taxes themselves.

What is now increasingly emerging is a split into two layers:

Two layers

Platform and customer relationship

The platform the customer visits and uses. This is where the customer relationship sits, and the central point of contact for all services.
Service and infrastructure

The provider that actually delivers the service. Often a specialist that can embed its product into other companies' platforms.

As our examples in the introduction show, the place customers visit is consolidating: many platforms offer more services than their own core business would suggest. At the same time, this usually does not mean that every service is actually delivered by that platform. Often functions from other service providers are embedded and aggregated on one central platform.

The customer relationship opens the door to further services

Two central perspectives therefore become decisive for understanding this: who provides the surface through which a customer steers their financial life, and who provides the infrastructure and functionality for the underlying services?

McKinsey's analysis of embedded finance in Europe examines exactly this perspective: the customer platform, that is the potential one-stop hub for finance, and the financial services provider delivering the functionality and infrastructure in the background. The figures speak for themselves: according to McKinsey, embedded finance in Europe already generated roughly 20 to 30 billion euros in 2023 and could exceed 100 billion euros by 2030, which would be 10 to 15 percent of total European banking revenues. Up to 25 percent of all retail banking sales to private customers and SMEs could then run through embedded functions.6

The strategic implication is clear: the customer relationship and the point of sale are concentrating. Not every provider and every function gets its own platform; instead, a central platform increasingly becomes the collection point for a wide range of services from different providers.

However, the customer relationship alone does not fully explain the dynamic. What also matters is the context a platform holds about its customer. A bank sees transactions. An insurer sees policies and savings potential. A broker sees investments. Accounting software sees business activity. Through open banking providers, this data can be shared and accessed. The real question is: where does the central hub for finance feel most natural to the end customer?

BCG confirms this thesis from another direction. In its analysis “Moving Embedded Finance from Promise to Practice”, BCG argues that vertical SaaS platforms are increasingly becoming the “operating system” for SMEs, and that they hold structural advantages over traditional banks. According to BCG and Adyen, the addressable market for embedded finance in North America and Europe is around 185 billion dollars, of which only about 32 billion has been captured so far. More than 80 percent of the market is therefore still open.7

One possible thesis: the most valuable financial platform of the future is not necessarily the one with the most products of its own, but the one with the best context about the customer. Because it is precisely this context, and the aggregated customer data, that makes it cheap to offer personalized products.

From embedded banking to embedded everything

Banking was the first category to be embedded systematically. BaaS providers such as Swan, Solaris or Banking Circle allow platforms to integrate accounts, payments and cards into their product without needing a banking license themselves. Swan describes the key term aptly: contextualization. Instead of “here is a bank account”, the platform says: “here is the functionality you need, exactly where you need it.”8

Insurance follows the same pattern. The Zurich Edge platform, for example, lets partners embed insurance products directly into their customer experiences: with their own UI, API connection and white-label options. The insurer provides the regulated function; the partner keeps the surface and the customer relationship. Zurich Edge already works with more than 40 digital partners under this model.9

Regulation is essential to this development too. The planned EU regulation FIDA (Financial Data Access) extends the scope of open banking and gives customers more control: from insurance and investments through to pension products, customers are to control themselves who can access which data, and interfaces are to be standardized.10

Taken together, this paints a clear picture: financial products are becoming more modular. Financial data is becoming interoperable. And the two together make integrated financial platforms considerably more capable.

Embedded tax & accounting

Banking is being embedded. Insurance is being embedded. Payments are embedded. Tax and accounting, by contrast, have often still been treated as a separate exercise in the recent past: as an annual event, or as a separate process for which you open a dedicated application. Yet daily transactions can feed tax projections or, for example, help capture work-related expenses. Recorded investments can be used for tax optimization and planning where enough information is available, and bank movements can flow straight into the books. It is therefore becoming apparent that tax and accounting are the next services to be embedded. In the US this is already happening at scale (with providers such as Column Tax or April); specialized providers with an interface to the tax authorities make it possible via API in the German market as well. More on this here: How do I implement an ELSTER interface?

There is no shortage of examples of relevant data: for private tax returns, salary payments, capital gains, insurance contributions, special expenses or work-related expenses. For accounting solutions, accordingly, personnel costs, vehicle fleet, material costs or revenue.

Tax and accounting are therefore logically being embedded into other financial products more and more, so that a one-off annual event or a separate process becomes an ongoing one that can feed all relevant data into decisions at any point in time.

Three stages for the future of tax and accounting

Embedded tax makes seamlessly integrated tax solutions possible in any platform. That changes the user experience. Alongside standalone tax and accounting solutions, which have been the standard so far, further stages of digital tax solutions emerge.

Stage 1: tax and accounting stay in one place and one process. The status quo, in which tools are offered as standalone solutions and customers use tax services in isolation.
- Tax: The customer opens a tax app once a year, completes the return and does not come back until the following year.
- Accounting: The business owner has a separate process for its bookkeeping.
That is the status quo for most users.
Stage 2: a platform capability instead of a separate surface. Tax and accounting solutions become a native feature in online banking, in the fintech app or in other financial platforms. The customer stays in their familiar workflow.
- Tax: The tax return is still fundamentally user-driven, but is already pre-filled with relevant data and transactions.
- Accounting: The books are still kept by the business itself, but bank movements and receipts already flow in prepared.
Stage 3: invisible infrastructure. Relevant data and decisions that touch planning, optimization and filing are captured and processed automatically on the customer's behalf.
- Tax: The platform calculates the relevant items continuously in the background and files on time at the end of the year; the user only has to confirm.
- Accounting: The platform prepares advance VAT returns automatically; the business only has to confirm.

The real structural shift

The future of financial services is therefore less about who becomes the next bank. It is about who becomes the hub through which customers access many services. Buhl, Lexware, Finanzguru and CLARK all come from different directions, but are moving towards the same architecture: one customer experience, with steadily more functionality, in the direction of a one-stop financial hub.

Tax and accounting apps are already connecting embedded banking, insurance and trading. Embedded tax & accounting is on the rise and now also gives banks, insurers and neobrokers the opportunity to embed tax, so as not to miss the race for the financial hub, to strengthen customer loyalty and to realize cross-selling potential. Tax and accounting are highly regulated, country-specific and computationally complex. Those are exactly the properties that make building in-house expensive, and exactly the properties that make a specialized infrastructure or API provider valuable.

No longer separate apps for tax and accounting, but tax and accounting as a capability: embedded where financial decisions are being made anyway.

Sources

All sources retrieved on 14 September 2026.

AnyTax is a software provider and not a tax advisor under the German Tax Advisory Act (StBerG). Tax advice remains a reserved statutory service for the professions authorized to provide it.

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