Three fintech launches this week reveal how far the industry startups have moved beyond banking: a business app that now includes a mobile plan, a wage-access card for UAE workers, and a Brazilian super-app that pulls in investments from rival institutions.
Fintech’s original promise was simple: better banking, faster and cheaper. But most recent product launches show the industry has long grown far more ambitious. In the past week alone, a UK business platform added telecom to its app, a UAE startup tackled the financial vulnerability of middle-income workers, and a Brazilian super-app pushed open finance to a new frontier. Together, they paint a picture of fintech expanding into every corner of financial and professional life.
Tide Becomes Your Business Phone Company Too
Tide, the UK business management platform serving nearly 800,000 small businesses (around 14% of the UK SME market) has done something no banking provider has done before: embedded a full mobile plan directly into its app. The new feature, called Tide Business Phone Number (BPN) and built in partnership with embedded connectivity provider Gigs, gives entrepreneurs a dedicated business phone number via eSIM, with no additional device required.
The service runs on Vodafone’s 5G network. Members on Tide’s Smart, Pro, and Max plans get unlimited calls and texts at no extra cost. Those wanting mobile data can add an unlimited 5G plan with 10GB EU roaming for £15 per month — with no credit checks, no annual price rises, and the freedom to cancel anytime inside the app.
The pitch is about eliminating a specific and familiar friction. Many small business owners use their personal phone for everything, including clients, suppliers, and couriers, blurring the line between work and personal life and leaving them exposed. Tide BPN lets users separate numbers on the same device and see clearly whether an incoming call is business or personal.
It is also a sign of how far embedded finance has travelled. What started with fintechs embedding payments into non-financial apps has now come full circle: a financial platform embedding a telecom product. Tide already serves over 1.6 million SMEs globally, including a fast-growing user base in India, and reached unicorn status last year with a $1.5 billion valuation.
LiaPay Solves a Payday Problem for UAE Workers
In the UAE, a new fintech called LiaPay — the result of a partnership between Liabify and Sharia-compliant financial institution Mawarid Finance, launched this week targeting middle-income workers with a different kind of problem: the gap between when you earn your money and when it actually arrives.
LiaPay is a prepaid Platinum Mastercard built around Earned Wage Access (EWA), a model that lets employees draw on wages they have already earned before their official payday. It is not technically a loan, since there is no interest and no debt, just earlier access to money already owed. The card also includes instant digital account creation, AI-powered financial tools, international remittances, and instant payments in a single ecosystem.
The stakes are real. According to Federal Reserve data, 37% of adults in the U.S., for example, say they could not cover a $400 emergency expense with cash. Though in the UAE the statistics might be a little different, the country where a large proportion of the workforce is made up of migrant workers sending money home, could surely appreciate flexible paycheck timing. EWA transactions in the US grew by over 90% between 2021 and 2022, and the trend is accelerating not only in the West, but also across the Middle East and Asia. Thus, in 2025, ABHI and KABi partnered to bring Earned Wage Access (EWA) to employees in Saudi Arabia, highlighting the need for similar solutions in the region.
LiaPay operates within a regulated, Sharia-compliant framework — a deliberate design choice in a market where Islamic finance principles govern the financial decisions of millions of workers.
PicPay Pulls In What Your Other Banks Are Hiding
Meanwhile in Brazil, PicPay — the digital bank that recently listed on NASDAQ and processed a 79% profit increase in the first nine months of 2025, has launched an investment aggregator feature that shows users their investments across multiple financial institutions, all within the PicPay app.
The feature connects via Brazil’s Open Finance infrastructure and consolidates a user’s full investment picture in one dashboard. It also identifies available balances at other institutions and surfaces investment opportunities accordingly. This builds on PicPay’s existing account aggregator, which already lets users see balances and transactions from rival banks — a notable feature in a country where the average person holds five to six financial accounts.
Brazil has reached roughly 94% digital payment adoption, making it one of the most fertile ground in the world for this kind of super-app ambition. With 32 million customers already holding a Pix key on PicPay, the platform has the scale to make a single-view financial dashboard genuinely useful and to nudge users toward investments they might otherwise never discover.
What connects these three launches is a common logic: fintech companies are not just trying to replace banks anymore. They are trying to become the single interface through which people manage their work, their pay, and their money. Whether that is a phone plan embedded in a business account, a wage card that smooths over cash-flow gaps, or a portfolio view that crosses institutional lines, the goal is the same — to make switching costs high enough that users never need to go anywhere else.
