Uber Eats just partnered with Pipe to offer working capital directly to restaurants inside the Uber Eats Manager app. It’s the same play we’ve already seen from Wix and GoDaddy: embed financing where small businesses already manage their operations. Why send merchants on a wild goose chase with brokers when you can put pre-approved offers right in their dashboard?
Why This Makes So Much Sense
- Customer acquisition costs collapse. Uber Eats already has the merchant relationship; Wix and GoDaddy already own the website and domain workflows. No middlemen required.
- Data visibility de-risks the loan. Platforms see order flow, subscription revenue, churn, payment history—the kind of signals brokers can’t touch.
- Friction evaporates. Merchants stay in the same dashboard they use every day. Compare that to getting dragged onto the broker negotiating merry-go-round, where the goal isn’t finding the best deal for the business—it’s cycling through whichever high-cost offers generate the fattest commission.
What Brokers Don’t Get
Brokers like to think they’re “trusted advisors.” In reality:
- They don’t underwrite.
- They don’t control distribution.
- They don’t own the data.
Their “value-add” is little more than throwing spaghetti at the wall to see which overpriced loan sticks. Embedded lending, by contrast, is built on precision: real-time data, direct distribution, and instant offers.
Who’s in Trouble
- Pure-play lenders: Without embedded channels, they face higher CAC, thinner margins, and less visibility into risk.
- Brokers: They don’t even realize their model is under existential threat. Most lack the skills (or honesty) to pivot into true advisory. They’ll just keep spinning merchants on the merry-go-round until platforms finally cut them out.
Who Wins
- Platforms: Uber Eats, Wix, GoDaddy, Shopify, Square—the list is growing fast. They already own the customer relationship and the data that de-risks lending.
- Merchants: SMBs that embrace embedded offers skip the broker circus and usually end up with faster, cheaper, and more transparent access to capital.
The Takeaway
The Uber Eats × Pipe partnership is yet another data point in a trend we’ve been tracking: platform-native finance is the future. Lower acquisition costs, better underwriting data, and seamless delivery make it a no-brainer.
For brokers, it’s the slow death of a model built on opacity and exploitation. They won’t see it coming. They never do.