As we continue our deep dive into embedded finance, I have on the show with me this week the woman who quite literally wrote the book on it! Fiat Republic Co-Founder and CC&GO Sophie Guibaud has a passion for embedded finance and has been advocating for it since before the term even existed.She defines embedded finance as the capacity to provide financial, insurance and lending services to the end user exactly at the point they need it, with the least amount of friction possible. As for the key players that make the embedded ecosystem so prolific (and possible), the regulators are number one on Sophie’s list. They are, after all, the ones that make it conceivable for a non-regulated company to use the license of another already-regulated company to provide value and service for their end users. And this is exactly what Fiat Republic does for the cryptocurrency space.We also talk about the importance of the tech companies who own the data that makes the embedded value chain possible, as well as the multitude of benefits that result from both a consumer and a brand perspective.As for the next 5-7 years, Sophie paints the picture of a world where we will be banking everywhere except banks, while our smartphones proactively pay our bills, and our cloud wallet intuitively performs transactions designed to optimize our finances. Tune in this week to hear Sophie talk about the then, now, and when of embedded finance, including the future promise of worry-free finance, frictionless payments, and intuitive optimization.