The ideal Jifiti transaction is almost aggressively unmemorable. A shopper chooses financing beside a purchase. A small-business owner applies for working capital inside a familiar journey. A bank’s name remains on the screen. Somewhere between the click and the approval, software checks identity, routes data, calls underwriting services, presents terms and moves funds. Jifiti does the connecting. The customer is not meant to leave humming its name.
That anonymity is not an accident; it is the product. Jifiti sells white-labeled lending infrastructure to banks, credit unions and other regulated lenders. It is not the lender of record, does not lend from its own balance sheet and does not need to win a popularity contest with borrowers. Its clients choose the loan, terms, channels and branding. Jifiti supplies the machinery that makes the program behave like a contemporary digital service.
This puts the company in a useful middle layer of finance. Banks have capital, licenses and long customer relationships, but often carry technology assembled across decades. Merchants have traffic and purchase intent, but rarely want another bespoke integration. Borrowers have learned to expect an answer now. Jifiti’s business is making those three realities cooperate.
The gift card that learned to lend
Jifiti’s route into lending began with a different form of stored value. Yaacov Martin, Shaul Weisband and Meir Dudai founded the company in 2011 as a digital gift-card business. The unglamorous work mattered: connecting brands, catalogs, recipients and checkout systems taught the team how value could move through a retailer’s environment without taking over the retailer’s identity.
The founders eventually saw a larger version of the same integration problem. Banks wanted to put loans at the point of sale, but connecting a lender’s systems to each merchant could be slow and expensive. Jifiti adapted its point-of-sale technology into a financing platform. The original business did not vanish. Today, Gifting Solutions by Jifiti offers branded gift-card marketplaces, corporate rewards and an API for automated issuance. It says its network spans hundreds of brands and has delivered millions of cards.
The pivot is instructive because it was not a fashionable leap from one buzzword to another. It was a reuse of plumbing. The company knew how to sit between brands and transaction systems. Lending added more difficult jobs - identity, compliance, underwriting, product rules and repayment - but the architectural instinct stayed the same.
Jifiti doesn’t sell the loan. It sells the route the loan takes.
A box of parts, not a new core
Banks are wary of software pitches that begin with replacing the core. Jifiti’s answer is modularity: take the components needed now and connect them to what already exists. The platform covers customer access points, onboarding, loan origination, underwriting orchestration, disbursement and settlement, loan-management connections, reporting and lender tools. Its Aurora BI layer gathers funnel data across markets and channels so a lender can see where applicants arrive, convert or disappear.
The system is loan-type agnostic. A financial institution can support installment loans, lines of credit, split payments, working capital, business loans, lease-to-own or secured products without maintaining a separate front end for each one. It can distribute them directly in its own app or embed them where a customer is already doing something else.
This also explains the economics. Jifiti is an enterprise technology vendor, though it does not publish pricing. The regulated institution keeps the balance-sheet role and controls the program. Merchants get more payment choices without becoming lenders. Jifiti earns its place by shortening deployment, reducing one-off integrations and giving clients a configurable layer across channels and markets.
The disappearing checkout
Tap Now, Pay Later, introduced in 2024, is the cleanest example of Jifiti’s design philosophy. Once a customer is approved, loan or credit funds can be provisioned as a virtual card into a major digital wallet. The customer taps a phone at the terminal as if using an ordinary card. Because existing payment rails complete the purchase, the merchant may need no special lending integration or staff training.
That changes the distribution problem. Traditional embedded finance asks each merchant to install a new door for the lender. A wallet-based virtual card lets the customer carry the door. For a bank, approved credit can travel beyond a single retail partner. For a merchant, reconciliation looks more like business as usual. The cleverness is less in the tap than in turning a loan approval into something the payment terminal already understands.
Illustration, not measured data: the bars show the relative logic of the approaches. Actual implementation work depends on the lender, merchant, market and product.
Banks return to the checkout
Consumer-facing BNPL companies proved that financing could be presented as a feature of the purchase rather than a trip to a bank branch. They also trained shoppers to recognize fintech brands at checkout. Jifiti takes a different side of that lesson: make the experience fast, but leave the bank’s brand in place. That matters to lenders that do not want a software provider competing for their customers, data or loan volume.
Jifiti’s named ecosystem makes the strategy tangible. It has worked with Mastercard on point-of-sale installments; with Finastra and FIS on broader embedded-finance stacks; and with Ingenico to reach merchants through a payments-platform environment. Publicly named financial institutions and brands include Citizens Bank, Seattle Bank, Barclays, CaixaBank, RBC, Crédit Agricole and IKEA, alongside merchants such as Peloton, Wayfair, Wyndham, Sonae and Coppel.
IKEA is the relationship that best shows the scale of the ambition. Jifiti began facilitating financing for IKEA with local banking partners in several European markets in 2019. In 2021, Ingka Investments - the investment arm of the largest IKEA retailer - put $22.5 million into Jifiti for a minority stake. The investor was also a customer trying to make financing work across stores, ecommerce and countries. Jifiti said it would remain bank-, network- and retailer-agnostic.
In 2026, the company formalized a partnership with Peach Finance aimed at U.S. community and regional banks. Jifiti handles the branded application, automated origination, underwriting orchestration and channel connections. Peach supplies the servicing system of record, from booking through repayment, reporting and compliance. Together they cover the loan lifecycle without pretending one vendor must build every layer.
Global lending makes that division of labor more than an architecture preference. A furniture loan in France, a line of credit for an American contractor and working capital for an equipment buyer do not share the same disclosures, approval logic or repayment pattern. Jifiti’s platform is designed to localize the journey while connecting local lenders and outside services. The merchant can offer financing across markets without presenting one crude global product; the bank can extend its reach without learning every merchant stack. For the end customer, the practical benefit is simpler: apply where the need appears, receive a decision in the same branded flow and use the funds without shuttling between sites. The company’s value is therefore partly subtraction - fewer handoffs, fewer disconnected interfaces and fewer reasons to abandon an application.
The competitive edge is not a louder brand. It is letting the client’s brand stay loud.
Where Jifiti fits - and where it doesn’t
The alternatives come from several directions. A bank can build internally, buy from a core provider, assemble specialist origination and servicing vendors, or work with a direct BNPL platform. Companies such as Amount and Blend sell digital lending software; Affirm and Klarna bring consumer distribution and, in some cases, lending relationships of their own. Jifiti’s line is narrower: configurable infrastructure for institutions that want to keep control.
That focus creates constraints as well as differentiation. Enterprise lending software must adapt to local regulations, legacy systems, credit policies and vendor ecosystems. Sales and implementation can be slower than downloading a consumer app. A platform that calls itself modular still has to prove those modules work together under the pressure of compliance, fraud, settlement and customer support. Invisible infrastructure is noticed immediately when it fails.
Jifiti’s culture page seems aware that this is sober work performed by humans. Its stated values include accountability, integrity, purposeful work and “thinking in curves, not lines.” Employee biographies are paired with dry jokes, and Walter, a retired greyhound, serves as office mascot. The combination is revealing: regulated plumbing on the product page, mild mischief on the people page.
Fifteen years after its founding, Jifiti occupies a market created by two stubborn facts. Customers want credit to appear in the flow of whatever they are already doing. Banks do not want to surrender lending to the interface that happens to sit nearest the customer. Jifiti’s answer is a bridge that can carry a bank’s product into that interface - then politely remove its own name from view.