Everyone in fintech eventually gets the itch to build a credit business. It’s where the biggest opportunities are. But it’s also a minefield. It’s capital-intensive, the risks are high, and for a pre-seed founder, it feels like betting the entire company before you’ve even dealt the cards.
So, the question I’ve been wrestling with is: how do you build a credit business in a capital-efficient way? How do you earn the right to take on that risk?
The market signals from the last few quarters are finally showing a clear path. The rise of Credit-as-a-Service (CaaS) platforms and the explosion in embedded lending are creating a new playbook for founders. It’s a playbook that doesn’t start with raising a massive debt fund.
The New Building Blocks are Here
The market for embedded finance is projected to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars by 2025. This isn’t just about payments anymore. It’s about embedding all financial services, and credit is the next frontier.
Specialized CaaS platforms are emerging that handle the complex infrastructure of lending—the licensing, the servicing, the compliance. This means a founder no longer needs to build the entire lending stack from scratch. They can partner to get started, which dramatically lowers the barrier to entry.
This is the strategic breakthrough. It allows for a “crawl, walk, run” approach to building a credit business.
Our Crawl, Walk, Run Strategy
This new reality maps perfectly to the dual-project strategy we’re building with Dentplicity and CLIN. It’s how we plan to get into the credit game without needing a nine-figure valuation on day one.
Crawl: The Unfair Data Advantage
Our first step is Dentplicity. By providing a data intelligence platform that helps practices understand their finances, we gain an unparalleled, real-time view of their financial health. We see their revenue, their expenses, their cash flow patterns. This isn’t just interesting data; it’s the single most valuable asset for underwriting. It’s our unfair advantage.
Walk: Partner with a CaaS Platform
Once we have that data advantage, we can move to the “walk” phase with CLIN. Instead of building our own balance sheet, we’ll partner with a CaaS provider. We can use the rich data from Dentplicity as our proprietary underwriting engine to offer embedded credit products directly within the CLIN platform.
Think about it: a dental practice needs to buy a new $50,000 piece of equipment. Because we already understand their finances, we can pre-approve them for a loan and offer it to them at the exact moment of need. The CaaS partner provides the capital and the rails; we provide the data and the distribution. This is a powerful, capital-light way to enter the market.
Run: Own the Full Stack
Only after we’ve proven the model, refined our underwriting algorithms, and demonstrated demand do we move to the “run” phase. This is the long-term vision: bringing the lending onto our own balance sheet and capturing the full value chain.
This staged approach is the pragmatic execution plan for the vision I laid out in From Deposits to Credit: The Full-Stack Opportunity. It’s how we get there without taking on existential risk too early. We’re not just building a product; we’re building a data asset that allows us to earn our way into the credit business. It’s the most capital-efficient path I can see. And it’s the one we’re taking.
Data sources: Cross River Bank 2025 Newsletters, various market reports on CaaS and Embedded Lending.