How RentSpree Became a Financial Hub for Landlords
Embedded finance has become a defining move for category-leading vertical SaaS companies. The reason is simple: when money flows outside your product, so does long-term value. RentSpree’s recent launch of a dedicated financial platform for small landlords shows how embedded finance can transform a workflow product into a financial operating system.
The problem: fragmented money workflows
RentSpree already sat at the center of the rental lifecycle, serving more than four million users across tenant screening, payments, and lease management. But like many vertical SaaS platforms, there was a structural gap: landlords still had to leave RentSpree to manage their money. That meant juggling multiple tools for screening, payments, banking, and reconciliation, which introduces friction, delayed access to funds, and limited financial visibility. For small landlords, this fragmentation directly affects profitability.
From payments to full financial operating system
RentSpree saw an opportunity to eliminate that gap by embedding financial services directly into the workflows landlords already relied on. Rather than adding “banking” as a standalone feature, RentSpree embedded accounts and bill pay into its existing product experience.1
Landlords can now:
- Collect rent inside RentSpree
- Store money in dedicated accounts held at FDIC-insured banks
- Earn interest on operating balances
- Automatically separate rental income from personal finances
- Pay expenses and manage cash flow by property without manual reconciliation
Speed to market: launching in weeks, not quarters
A common misconception among product leaders is that embedded finance requires years of development, regulatory lift, and operational risk. By using Unit’s ready-to-launch banking and bill pay modules, RentSpree was able to:
- Launch embedded accounts and bill pay in less than 2 weeks rather than quarters
- Avoid building or maintaining core financial infrastructure
- Offer modern money movement capabilities to their customers on day one
This allowed RentSpree to focus engineering and product effort on user experience, workflow integration, and adoption, not financial plumbing.
“We were very intentional about not treating this like a simple referral partnership,” said Federico Pennelli, Director of Product at RentSpree. “With Unit’s Ready to Launch solution, we avoided the heavy lift of building and operating a banking product, but we didn’t give up control. We still get real-time access to banking events via webhooks and can tie them back to our product and users, which is critical for adoption and iteration. It lets us move fast without creating a long-term dependency or data blind spot.”
Why embedded finance changed the business case
Across vertical SaaS, category leaders are becoming financial hubs for their users. Embedding finance unlocked three outcomes that matter to SaaS founders, product leaders, and boards:
- Stronger retention: When customer funds live inside your platform, switching costs increase naturally. RentSpree becomes where landlords run their business financially, not just operationally.
- Clearer customer ROI: Features like automatic financial separation, consolidated cash-flow views, interest-bearing accounts, and integrated bill pay directly improve landlord economics.
- Expansion without rebuilding the product: RentSpree extended existing payment and screening flows instead of inventing new workflows. Embedded finance completed the product rather than complicating it.
Ready to explore embedded finance for your platform?
If you’re evaluating embedded finance and want to see what “launching in weeks, not quarters” actually looks like, try a demo to see our ready-to-launch banking and bill pay products in action. Or talk to our team to understand what an embedded finance roadmap could look like for your business.
Learn more about our partnership: Press Release
1 RentSpree is a financial technology company and is not a bank. Unit is a financial technology company and is not a bank. Banking services provided by i3 Bank, Member FDIC, and Bill Pay bank services are provided by Lincoln Savings Bank, Member FDIC. RentSpree and Unit are not FDIC Insured. Accounts are eligible for pass-through deposit insurance only to the extent pass-through insurance is permitted by the rules and regulations of the FDIC, and if the requirements for pass-through insurance are satisfied. FDIC insurance only covers the failure of a covered bank.
