• I grew up going to a big family reunion every year.
• It’s always felt like a celebration, and as my life changed, attending was a familiar comfort.
• Now, I bring my two sons, and I’ve realized what an impact the tradition has had on my life.

For as long as I can remember, we spent the Saturday before Father’s Day with our extended family nearby at my cousin’s home outside Philadelphia, swimming, dancing to live music, and immersing ourselves in the company of our cousins. Some traveled from as far as California, and we’d mingle with our relatives from 2 p.m. until dusk. It was magical — and yet so ordinary in my youthful mind.

As a child, I knew I was part of a vibrant gathering — an occasion akin to a wedding or Bat Mitzvah — but it wasn’t until I became a mother that I understood the impact these gatherings had on my life.

It’s always been an unforgettable day

My great-great-grandmother, Sadie, had 10 children, including my great-grandmother, and each went on to have their own family. When our reunions began in the mid 80s, these 10 siblings were the matriarchs and patriarchs of our family. They’d gather on the patio, sharing stories and kissing every child until lipstick on the cheek became the family trend. And while the little girl in me understood this to be a vivacious family celebration, I couldn’t yet comprehend how these celebratory summer days would truly shape me.

During my elementary years, these gatherings felt universal; they were woven into my childhood, written into our calendar like a holiday. With cousins around my age, we swam until our fingertips wrinkled. We devoured hot dogs and soft pretzels to hold us over until dinner before visiting the frogs in the pond and hitting a ball or two on the tennis court. My brother and I were three years apart, but there, I bonded with cousins born within months of me.

We have a talent show, a magic show, and eat delicious food

As we buoyantly meandered the grounds, the adults emitted a sense of appreciation through infectious smiles, so radiant even the children noticed. In the early 90s, the Philadelphia Mummers — a group in costume that sing and dance during the Philadelphia New Year’s parade — marched into our family reunion as if we were standing on South Broad Street on January 1st. A talent show allowed the children to display our various instrumental skills, singing voices, and even juggling proficiency. And each year we demonstrated our progress.

A professional magic show usually separated the afternoon from the evening, but as a child, it all morphed into another celebration in the collection of many, leaving a permanent feeling of belonging, one I couldn’t comprehend at the time.

As daylight dwindled, we sat at tables beneath the melting sun, eating crabcakes, grilled shrimp, corn salad, sauteed vegetables, and filet. We devoured ice cream cookie sandwiches for dessert as lightning bugs lit up the sky while sharing family stories and remembering those we missed. Family shirts were printed numerous times; they still linger in the bottom of my drawers, a reminder that I am part of a village.

While we grew physically and intellectually, these grounds remained unchanged, and each time we returned, so did a sense of wonder that children often lose as they approach their teen years.

As my life changed, this tradition was a comfort for me

When I was in college, my life shimmied to a small town three hours away, and summers at home were a welcomed comfort. Our family reunion became a connection to my childhood, a reminder that while much of life changes, few precious things remain the same. As my responsibilities increased and adulthood grew closer, transitions became overwhelming.

But there was always that one day in June where I’d reconnect with a piece of my youth, swimming in the pool, visiting the frogs, and mingling on the grounds that held a chapter of my childhood. Being in a familiar location with family once again, as memories from years passed flooded my brain, became my comfort amid so much adjustment.

Bringing my sons has shown me the impact the reunion has had on my life

Now, my two boys, 14 and 11, are growing up with the same tradition, and I see myself in them as they swim with their cousins, jumping from the very diving board I stood on not long ago. I watch them laughing as they sit on the same hill I perched on as the magician pulls the ace of spades from the card deck. And for a moment, it’s as if time has stood still. I return to the little girl who wandered those grounds year upon year, unknowingly building a sense of belonging. Only now, I’ve become one of the adults with an infectious smile.

This June is our 40th reunion, and I can’t imagine a life without these gatherings. When my children go off to college, I hope this day remains their constant, providing balance in their ever-changing world. One day, they’ll realize these gatherings are anything but ordinary — they are the days that stand out among the rest.

US Central Command shared a video showing a US Navy destroyer firing at an Iranian cargo vessel in the Arabian Sea. The USS Spruance intercepted the ship after its crew refused repeated warnings to stop. After verbal warnings and the sounding of an alarm, the destroyer fired rounds onto the cargo ship with its MK 45 gun.

According to CENTCOM, US Marines now have custody of the ship. Iran confirmed the seizure of the vessel, and said it would retaliate “soon.”

• Music marketing now includes agencies that use sock puppet accounts to post songs on TikTok.
• It sometimes makes it hard to determine what’s organically popular and what’s spreading online because of “clipping.”
• A marketing agency promoted the songs of buzzy rock band Geese by flooding TikTok with clips, a new report says.

I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about how the internet works.

I can usually tell if a piece of content is “organic” or advertising. And yet, there’s always the unknown unknowns: You might think you can always tell if someone has a bad toupee, but what about all the good ones that you didn’t notice?

Yet, I feel more and more that we are living in a time of undetectable toupees on the internet. And even I have to admit that I am an easy mark these days.

Take the recent kerfluffle over a WIRED article about how a marketing agency promoted the songs of the buzzy rock band Geese by flooding TikTok with videos from accounts created by the agency, a tactic the agency’s founders described in detail in a Billboard podcast interview. (The agency didn’t return BI’s request for comment.) This set off a lot of discussion about whether these strategies are just the latest form of marketing for the music industry, or some nefarious “psyop” (the consensus seems to be the former).

I am less concerned with music promotion than I am with the idea that, indeed, there is a lot of fake content floating around, and I am less and less equipped to accurately identify it when I come across it.

How ‘clipping’ makes it harder to tell what’s authentic

A lot of this is the proliferation of “clipping” — paying people to post short clips of longer content, like the most interesting 30 seconds of a podcast interview or the craziest moment of an eight-hour livestream. Have you noticed clips of the looksmaxxer Clavicular all over your social feeds lately? Those aren’t being posted by his official account — they’re from clippers.

This new clipping economy also extends to music and traditional media like TV and movies, and it is increasingly hard to tell whether a clip you scroll past in your feed is part of a paid campaign.

For example, I looked at the Discord channel for a clipping agency, where various ad campaigns will offer money in exchange for views.

A stand-up comedy special being broadcast on a streamer was offering $65 per 100,000 TikTok views. A right-wing podcast was offering $150 per 100,000 views for clips made with its Rumble stream. A popular personal finance YouTuber was offering $75 per 100,000. That campaign had some instructions: “very simple, don’t make [YouTuber] or the guest(s) look unnecessarily bad … let the content itself do the talking.”

Putting out short clips from longer videos or streams is simply the current way of doing things, and the results are obvious. One analysis of the audience for TBPN, the tech news livestream that OpenAI just bought, showed that while the livestreams average only 7,000 viewers, the clips average 257,000 views. That’s a big difference!

To be clear: Geese is a popular band that people like; Clavicular is a popular internet figure; TPBN is a popular news podcast — regardless of any clipping. You can’t fake content people find appealing — people have to actually like it for this stuff to go viral and show up in your algorithms.

But still, we often mentally gauge the popularity of something by how often it pops up in our social feeds. And the fact that some of these videos are being boosted by forces other than pure fandom, well, that is clouding our perception a bit.

Over the last decade, we have honed our BS-detectors for certain kinds of advertising or marketing — the way an influencer tags a brand, or a celebrity wears a clothing label. But this is a new twist — something to wrap our heads around, and it’s clearly effective marketing for now, perhaps precisely because we aren’t good at detecting it (yet).

Of course, only an idiot would believe that everything they see online is authentic. You and I? We’re not idiots! I’m giving us some grace here to admit we’re getting fooled lately.

Editor’s note: On April 18, Palantir posted a 1,000-word distillation of “The Technological Republic” to X, prompting a fresh wave of discourse on its theses. Our review of the Palantir book canon was originally published on March 17.

Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the Executive Innovation Corps. The Pentagon has introduced many initiatives to deepen relationships with Silicon Valley. But making officers out of multimillionaire executives with no military experience served as a strong symbol of a new era in which venture capitalists and technologists see themselves as essential to the defense of the nation.

The tech industry, which once prided itself on its libertarian- and counterculture-inflected antiwar ideals, has emphatically re-enlisted in the American military project. Drawn by patriotism and lucrative government contracts, numerous tech companies — from established giants like Google and SpaceX to military-minded startups in Southern California — have started working for the defense establishment, from supplying the Department of Homeland Security to building AI-powered drones and autonomous weapons to be used in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Anduril, a leading munitions startup, just announced a Pentagon contract that may be worth up to $20 billion.

No company has driven tech’s transformation from keyboard to warrior like Palantir, a data and analytics firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, which has a current market cap of $360 billion. Palantir’s financial network and its alumni are responsible for bringing numerous defense-tech startups into being. And it helped brush away the tech industry’s reticence to be involved in war-making.

Now, a growing canon of books by and about Palantirians is helping to crystallize, and proselytize, tech’s new hawkishness. Last year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his colleague Nicholas W. Zamiska published “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” which outlined their austere vision for a militarized republic secured by Silicon Valley technologies and led by highly skilled engineers. Last fall, New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Steinberger published an authorized biography, “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.” Now, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer and one of the four techies-turned-officers, has published “Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III.” Cowritten with his colleague Madeline Hart, “Mobilize” claims that the US government needs to urgently boost military production — with the help of Silicon Valley — in order to head off a conflict with China, which the authors think will attempt to capture Taiwan in 2027.

From these books, and from a battery of public statements by Karp and his cofounders, a distinctive worldview emerges — an unapologetically nationalistic attitude that has total contempt for one’s enemies in politics and business and that sees constant, world-rending conflict in our future. This belief system was developed by a group of people who exhibit a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats. You might call it Palantirianism.

Birthed from the 20-year-long global war on terror, which coincided with the tech boom, Palantirianism holds that America’s adversaries don’t negotiate for peace. They surrender entirely — or, as Karp has said, they will be too “scared” to challenge the US in the first place because they fear immediate destruction. Palantirians’ catchword is “deterrence” — derived not from fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or diplomacy but by developing overwhelming AI-based firepower. “The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war,” Karp writes in “The Technological Republic.“

Under Palantirianism, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about is good for the world — but it would be far better with the tech industry’s participation and leadership. “Eisenhower wasn’t warning about the existence of the military-industrial complex; he was warning about its potential for undue influence, a distinction often lost,” write Sankar and Hart. In their view, bringing together Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is not a step toward undue influence for America’s tech billionaires. It’s exactly what the country requires: “American capitalism and the American military need each other,” they write. “Reuniting the American industrial base, commercial and defense, is an existential issue.”

Palantirianism exhibits a profound wish to live in interesting times, to be the shield defending America in a world of constant threats.

Palantirians see securing American military hegemony as the national priority. Karp, who once called himself a “neo-Marxist” and a Democratic Party supporter before drifting rightward, told his biographer that national security is the only issue that matters to him, and that the tech industry’s workers should devote themselves to the same. “A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose,” he writes. The answer for Karp, the high priest of Palantirianism, is obvious: What ought to be built is what makes people safer. What makes people safer is empowering the military, police, and intelligence services. That is his vision of the common good.

His vision is now transforming the tech industry, the military, and how we look at national security. “We have made the mistake of allowing a technocratic ruling class to form and take hold in this country without asking for anything quite substantial in return. What should the public demand for abandoning the threat of revolt?” Karp writes, sounding like the Marxist of his youth. “Free email is not enough.”

Palantir grew out of a program at PayPal — where Thiel was CEO — to fight financial fraud in its system. The company itself was later founded in 2003 with an explicit mission: defending the West, which its founders see as imperiled. “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” Karp writes early in his book. It’s not always clear what those threats are (or even what constitutes “the West”). In the conservative tech mogul’s imaginarium, wokeness and DEI seem to be as dangerous to the American public as a revanchist Russia. Karp frequently refers to an organized “assault on religion,” without elaborating except to say that it “left us vulnerable as a society.”

With seed money from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture capital firm — which the agency established to help incubate national-security startups — Palantir slowly grew to become the go-to analytics platform for much of the military and intelligence establishment. It wasn’t an easy ride: The company was in the red for more than 20 years, and it sued the US Army, claiming that it had boxed out Palantir by violating its own procurement rules. Palantir won the lawsuit, cultivated numerous government and military insiders (who were sometimes given its software for free), and now runs a software platform, known as Project Maven, that’s used across the US military and NATO. It has other software tools that have been used by corporations, police departments, hospitals, and the federal government when it was tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maven started as software to analyze drone video feeds, with a $10 million contract going to Google. After Google employees protested working for the Pentagon and Google dropped the project, Palantir, working alongside other tech companies, picked it up and ran with it. Maven eventually became “an all-purpose AI operating system” integrating vast data sources into a dashboard that intelligence analysts have said makes their work much easier, even saving lives in the field. Maven is now used in conjunction with other systems, such as Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, which sits on top of Palantir’s platform. The Washington Post reported that Claude was used to rapidly generate thousands of targets for the ongoing US-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. The US military is investigating whether AI was used to target the bombing of a school that killed at least 100 Iranian children. In a sign of how Maven has the potential to take humans out of the loop, Sankar and Hart note in their book that “machine-to-machine connections were enabled to allow Maven to communicate with weapons systems and send confirmed targets directly to artillery.”

With its martial mission, Palantir isn’t like many software companies. Most employees have one of three job titles: deployment strategist, product development engineer, or forward-deployed engineer. The latter group is software engineers sent to work directly with clients — whether in Manhattan or Kabul — to customize Palantir’s tools and troubleshoot on the fly.

Karp calls himself “a fluorescent praying mantis.”

Leading this motley “artists colony” is Karp, who has a Ph.D. from Goethe University, enjoys cross-country skiing with his Norwegian ex-commando bodyguards, practices tai chi, and retains four Austrian assistants with whom he speaks in German. An ex-Israeli intelligence officer serves as “a kind of fixer” for Karp, who describes to his biographer a lifelong feeling of personal vulnerability.

Karp once had a policy of never spending more than $1 million for a home; that was before he received a $1.1 billion pay package in 2020. Now he owns a private jet and lavish properties all over the country, most of them in ski areas. Recently, he spent $120 million on a Benedictine monastery in Colorado.

He calls himself “a fluorescent praying mantis.” With his many-limbed mannerisms and braggadocious quips, Karp has turned himself into a mascot for Palantir’s culture. “Always energetic and upbeat around the office,” he’s known for launching into impromptu talks with employees that become an “orgy of free association,” Steinberger writes. He can be “a little bit incoherent,” but also exhibits “crazy charisma.”

In public, his mad-mogul image can play well, generating viral clips of his vows to drone enemies with “fentanyl-laced urine.” TV producers began to love him because “he was reliably unfiltered, thanks in part to his practice of getting hopped-up on Mexican Coke beforehand.”

The son of a white Jewish father and a Black mother, Karp’s identity has been a core throughline in his life and career. As a child, Karp was bullied at school, contributing to a sense of fear and personal instability.

“You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic — would you not come up with the idea that you’re fucked?” Karp says to Steinberger. In this context, Karp’s sense of identity was hopelessly complicated and a potential social liability.

One of Karp’s close friends from college said, “He was much more of a Black man then than he is now.”

Karp didn’t tell his Palantir colleagues that he was Black until 2019, but he presented differently in his youth. He went to college at Haverford, where he “was active in black student affairs, and his social life mainly revolved around Haverford’s black community,” Steinberger writes. He organized a conference at Yale about racism on college campuses and wore a Palestinian keffiyeh in a yearbook photo. One of his close friends from the time said, “He was much more of a Black man then than he is now.”

After college, Karp enrolled at Stanford Law School, which he almost immediately regarded as a mistake. He became friends with another disenchanted classmate, Thiel, who at the time was already a deeply ideological veteran of campus culture wars.

After Stanford, Karp moved to Germany to pursue a doctorate in sociology at Goethe University. Karp would later say that Jurgen Habermas, one of Germany’s postwar intellectual giants, was for a time his dissertation advisor, which Habermas has denied. According to letters examined by Steinberger, Habermas tried to steer Karp toward an English-language degree in another subject. “Your topic would require a literary approach to a topic that often overwhelms the linguistic sensibility of us native speakers — and yours, you won’t blame me, even more so,” Habermas wrote to Karp.

Karp didn’t listen. He went on to finish his dissertation — an examination of how aggression is used as a tool of social integration — which he wrote in German under the supervision of Karola Brede, who had previously studied under Habermas. With Brede, Karp cowrote an academic article — the only one he published — a consideration of “eliminationist” anti-Semitism and Daniel Goldhagen’s book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”

In the years since, Karp has embraced his Jewishness while expressing reluctance to claim his Black identity. The story of his parents’ relationship became for him a kind of cautionary tale of how identity politics run amok.

“My father wanted to marry a Black woman,” says Ben Karp, Alex’s brother. “Dating Leah was a powerful way of signaling his progressivism,” Steinberger notes. Leah Jaynes liked that Bob Karp was Jewish, and Karp liked that she was Black. They eventually divorced, after which Bob Karp remarried and adopted biracial children. Bob’s new family didn’t sit well with his sons. “Alex’s realization, years later, that racial and ethnic identity had been foundational to his parents’ relationship was part of the reason he developed a visceral dislike of identity politics,” writes Steinberger. “He felt as if he had been the product of virtue signaling, and it bothered him.”

Steinberger depicts Karp’s personal reckoning over his parentage as part of what moved him to the right. In 2015, he told company employees that he didn’t like Trump. According to “The Philosopher in the Valley,” Karp once told a friend that he wouldn’t mind pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of a helicopter. The company has gone on to work for ICE and other government agencies executing hardline Trump policies.

Two global events contributed to Karp’s political metamorphosis: COVID and Hamas’ attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. During the pandemic, Karp stocked up on canned food and bullets, and loved his time in isolation. “While the pandemic was wretched for most people, Karp found it blissful,” writes Steinberger. Plenty of time for cross-country skiing.

After Palantir returned from remote work, Karp’s proclamations became more extreme. He started calling Palantir “a prepper company” and reveling in its role in doling out violence to enemies of the West.

Oct. 7 reanimated Karp’s sense of personal vulnerability and his commitment to Israel. Having once celebrated the virtues of debate with his friend and political opposite Peter Thiel, he told Palantirians that the company wouldn’t tolerate any disagreement over its work for the country. Palantir took out a full page ad in The New York Times declaring, “Palantir Stands With Israel.”

Under Karp’s never-apologize-never-explain leadership, Palantir has become a leading bogeyman for opponents of the surveillance state. New York City is now speckled with posters denouncing the company as the “enemy.” Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich recently called Palantir “America’s most dangerous corporation.”

The truth is more tangled. By its own claim, Palantir proudly stands for American militarism, abets the surveillance state, and has catalyzed a shift in the tech industry toward supporting the security services. But influential as Palantir is, the company makes software — tools to implement government policy. It does not directly collect data or conduct surveillance. It sucks up that information from clients, including authoritarian states, making the job of war-making or repression potentially much easier. There are numerous firms beyond Palantir — including the big five “prime” defense contractors — engaged in this kind of work.

Palantirianism — a belief system that is now being spread through venture capital investments in startups like Anduril, Saronic, and Shield AI, and tech’s close alliance with the Trump administration — is far more influential than Palantir itself. People “want to know they are safe, and safe means that the other person is scared,” Karp said at an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum. This is the simple core belief that now animates the defense tech industry and swaths of the Silicon Valley elite. (Elon Musk is a Karp fan.)

By 2025, Karp was writing in shareholder letters that the West owed its success to its primacy at “applying organized violence” — a notion of which he evidently approved. He started talking about how certain cultures were “regressive and harmful” compared to others.

“We have been building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, and irrational, a world in which you have to show strength,” Karp said during an earnings call. People “have to pick sides.” Some people “are violent and not conformant with morality.”

For many years, Karp said that fascism was his greatest fear. He wanted nothing more than to stem the rise of the far right in America. Yet Karp’s company has provided direct assistance to what many observers have described as the most authoritarian president in US history. He did all this with the help of his close friend Peter Thiel, Palantir’s chairman, an early Trump supporter who decades ago said that he had tired of electoral democracy. Steinberger summed up the contradiction: “With Trump restored to power, it appeared that authoritarianism had triumphed in the United States and that Palantir, which Karp had always touted as a bulwark of the liberal international order, would henceforth be serving the agenda of a president who was contemptuous of America’s political tradition.”

Although Karp has matured, in his biographer’s view, into a “statesman CEO,” he is still driven by spleen. Throughout “The Philosopher in the Valley,” he repeatedly complains that his college alma mater hasn’t invited him to give a speech or cultivated him as a donor. Karp detests Haverford with a similar passion that he applies to terrorists and student protesters. “I eventually came to realize that he needed enemies,” Steinberger writes of Karp. That need, it turns out, has implications for us all.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.”

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed how businesses collect data, automate processes, and deliver services. But as connected devices become more deeply embedded in everyday operations, another layer of innovation is gaining traction alongside them: embedded finance.

Financial services are moving beyond traditional banks and separate payment systems. Now, they are built right into digital platforms, devices, and customer workflows. For service-based industries, this change is setting new standards for what a smooth customer experience means.

What Is Embedded Finance?

Embedded finance means adding services such as payments, loans, or insurance directly into non-financial platforms. This way, businesses can offer these services themselves, so customers do not have to go to outside providers.

This approach has changed industries like e-commerce and SaaS by enabling instant transactions and built-in financing. A 2024 Bain & Company report estimates that embedded finance could handle over $7 trillion in global transactions over the next 10 years, underscoring its rapid growth.

Where IoT Fits In

IoT is important for embedded finance because it creates ongoing, data-rich interactions between businesses and customers. Connected devices, such as smart home systems and wearable health monitors, provide real-time insights that can lead to services, maintenance, or upgrades.

What’s starting to happen now is that these alerts don’t stop at “something needs attention.” They push people closer to actually doing something about it.

Say an HVAC system detects a performance issue—it doesn’t just log it; it nudges the user to book a repair. A health device might flag an issue, prompting scheduling follow-up care. Fleet platforms do something similar, surfacing maintenance needs as vehicles rack up mileage.

At that point, the gap between spotting the issue and paying to fix it is getting smaller. In a lot of cases, it’s happening in the same place, almost as part of the same decision.

Adding financial options directly into these workflows makes the process smoother and helps people act on insights more quickly.

The Customer Experience Layer

As IoT systems become more common, people are getting used to things happening faster—and with less effort on their part. If something needs attention, they expect to deal with it right away, without jumping between platforms or repeating steps.

That expectation doesn’t stop at the service itself. It carries over into how people pay.

This is where embedded finance starts to matter. Instead of sending customers somewhere else to figure out payment, the option shows up at the moment they’re already making a decision. In service-based industries, especially, timing can make a difference. If the process feels quick and straightforward, people are far more likely to move forward rather than put it off.

Customer Financing as a Core Component

Customer financing is one of the most important uses of embedded finance, especially for expensive services.

Upfront costs can make it hard for people to access services like healthcare, home repairs, or elective treatments. Even if customers see the value, not being able to pay all at once can cause them to delay or give up on getting the service.

Adding financing options directly into the customer experience makes it easier for people to pay. For instance, platforms like Cherry allow customers to split payments for services so they can stay within the provider’s system. This approach makes financing feel like a normal part of the process and meets customers’ needs today.

Business Impact: Beyond Payments

For many businesses, embedded finance is increasingly seen as less of a “nice-to-have” and more of a driver of revenue.

When payment and financing options are built into the experience, customers are more likely to move forward. It removes a point of hesitation. In some cases, it also leads people to choose larger or more comprehensive services than they originally planned. McKinsey has noted that this kind of integration can lift revenue per customer by 5 to 15 percent in certain industries, particularly those with higher upfront costs.

For companies already using IoT systems, the effect can be even more noticeable. When a device flags an issue or recommends a service, and the customer can immediately see a way to pay for it, the gap between decision and action narrows. Instead of adding steps, everything happens in one place—and that tends to translate into higher follow-through.

Challenges and Considerations

That said, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch and adding financing to your platform.

Once you step into anything that touches payments or lending, you’re dealing with a different set of rules. Financial services are tightly regulated, and businesses need to be clear on what’s required from a compliance standpoint before rolling anything out.

There’s also the question of data. IoT systems already handle a steady stream of information, and adding financial interactions on top of that raises the stakes. Protecting user data and keeping systems secure isn’t optional—it’s part of maintaining trust.

The customer experience is also important. When financing options are confusing or hard to find, they make things worse. The goal is to keep everything simple, so customers know what they’re signing up for without having to pause and figure it out.

The Convergence of IoT and Finance

Bringing IoT and embedded finance together is changing how companies offer and monetize their services. Connected devices are no longer just for monitoring or automation. More often, they are becoming entry points for transactions and financial choices.

As this trend continues, companies that add financial features to their digital platforms will be better prepared to meet changing customer needs. Embedded finance is no longer just a bonus. It is now a central part of modern service systems, combining insight, action, and payment into one smooth experience.

The post IoT-Driven Embedded Finance: Transforming Customer Experience in Service Industries appeared first on IoT Business News.

• Sarah Israel, 40, found boxes of McDonald’s memorabilia from the ’70s and ’80s.
• Her dad, a McDonald’s executive, collected pins, a burger lamp, and branded items.
• She felt nostalgic, and thousands online shared the same reaction.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sarah Israel. It has been edited for length and clarity.

My dad has always been a collector. It was like a primal need of his, collecting.

Ever since I can remember, he would take my siblings and me to yard sales, flea markets, and garage sales. I hated it and begged him to stop taking us along to look at garbage. I wanted to go to the movies, not talk to vendors at flea markets about what they had on offer.

Although he collected anything and everything, or at least that’s what it felt like, he only displayed his music. His records were all out in our music room. He had thousands of vinyl records and CDs.

Almost everything else was just stored away in boxes in the basement: salt-and-pepper shakers, vintage shoes, and rooster figurines galore. This might have been a decision influenced by my mom, who hated clutter.

I helped my parents downsize

We didn’t know the extent of what he had collected until recently, when all of us siblings have been helping my parents downsize. We went into the basement and slowly started opening boxes, one by one, not sure of what we would find.

I opened a box, then a few more, all of which had McDonald’s collectibles. My dad had been an executive with McDonald’s for years in the 80s. He started as an assistant store manager here in Canada and eventually became the Training Director for the Canadian market, a role that involved lots of travel to the US for conferences. In the mid-80s, he moved to Paris to work as the Training Director for the European market, 19 countries in all, before finally settling back in Montreal in a role at the head office.

Throughout his years working for McDonald’s, my dad had picked up various items along the way. Things that were very specific to wherever he was. There were Happy Meal toys, clocks, watches, mugs, clothing, a voice note recorder, and lots of pins.

As I sorted through the boxes, all the memories came back to life of my childhood, the years before life became complicated. Life then was so simple, and waves of nostalgia washed over me as I held each item. These memories that had been tucked away in the recesses of my mind suddenly came back to the front and center.

People online were really into my dad’s collection

It wasn’t only me who felt this way; I found out all too quickly. As a seller of vintage items, I started making videos on social media about what I’d found.

The response was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I’m sure it’s because I hit on this tender spot in millennials — this time in life when the most exciting thing was wondering what toy you’d get in your Happy Meal. The world’s landscape right now is really challenging, and I think people just want to lean into nostalgia, into a period in history when things didn’t feel quite so difficult.

Even though I have loved looking at the McDonald’s collectibles, I’ve decided to sell nearly all of them. I’ve looked at things one at a time, consciously appreciated them, and then moved on to the next thing. It’s hard to do, but it makes me happy to think about all these items in their new homes, being enjoyed by their new owners for years to come.

I won’t pretend it’s easy, though, because these McDonald’s items aren’t only a reminder of my own history, but also that of my dad’s. They remind me of who my dad once was and what he did for all those years while we were young children. And now I have to assign a monetary value to them so I can sell them.

I’ve decided to keep a few things, some pins from when my parents were in Paris, but I’ll be selling the rest.

I’m excited that people will buy their favorite items and will be so excited to display them. The collectible that has received the most attention is the burger lamp. It makes me feel good to know that the lamp, alongside all the other items, won’t be hidden away in boxes any longer.