Saumil Mehta joins Unit's Board of Directors
Saumil Mehta, former Square CPO and current Ticketmaster President, joins Unit’s board to help platforms move beyond launching financial products and drive real adoption and retention.
Saumil Mehta is the Global President of Ticketmaster and spent nine years at Square as Chief Product Officer and Head of Business. He helped scale the company from pre-IPO to $3.6 billion in annual gross profit. He ran Product, Marketing, and Partnerships during the years Square moved from a payments company into a financial operating system for millions of sellers.
Saumil joins Unit's board because the problem Unit is focused on is one he's spent his career solving: getting users to actually move their money through software, and keep it within the platform experience.
Embedded finance isn't a product problem anymore. It's an adoption problem, and it's one of the hardest ones in software. Getting users to move their money through a new product, and keep it there, takes a specific kind of expertise you only get from doing it. The Unit team has launched more embedded finance programs than any other platform, and they ship at a pace that matches how fast this space is moving.
Saumil Mehta
The toughest problem in embedded finance
Launching financial products inside software is a solved problem. Hundreds of platforms have gone live with accounts, cards, payments, and capital. Unit supports more than 100 of them, serving over 2 million end users and processing more than $80 billion in payments per year.
What isn't solved is what happens after launch. A platform launches a card product. First-quarter numbers look solid. Then adoption flattens. Users activated the card but kept spending on their old one.
The problem is getting users to change how they actually spend and move money. Most don't. Solving this is the difference between launching financial products and building ones that drive retention.
Every one of our customers could launch financial products. The ones that broke through the adoption ceiling treated financial products as core to the user experience, not something bolted on.
Ehud Fisher, CPO, Unit
Why Saumil
Mehta spent nine years solving this problem at Square as the company expanded from payment processing into cards, then deposit accounts, then lending, then payroll. Each product made the next easier to adopt and harder to leave. By the time a seller was processing, spending, borrowing, and running payroll through Square, switching meant losing a mission-critical financial suite.
The compounding was because each financial product deepened the relationship with the one before it.
That instinct, what it actually takes to move user behavior at scale inside a software product, is exactly what Unit is building toward for the platforms on its infrastructure.
The next chapter of embedded finance won't be about whether platforms can launch financial products. It'll be about whether those products become the reason customers stay. Unit is building the infrastructure for that phase, and bringing on the people who've done it before.
Unit is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services are provided by one or more of Unit's bank partners, Members FDIC.
