Q&A: Nima Montazeri on Liberis’ blueprint for smarter SMB funding

Liberis CPO Nima Montazeri explains how the fintech is scaling embedded finance across borders using GenAI, pre-approval engines, and flexible APIs—while maintaining a competitive edge through proprietary data and strategic compliance infrastructure.

Editorial Team
May 5, 2025
4 minutes

For many fintechs, embedded finance remains a buzzword. For Liberis, it’s a decade-long discipline.

At the sidelines of ETA Transact 2025 in Las Vegas, Bobsguide sat down with Chief Product Officer Nima Montazeri to take a rare look inside the company’s real-time product thinking—and the infrastructure powering flexible capital for small businesses across multiple markets.

With past experience launching digital health tools at Babylon and advising scaleups at ThoughtWorks Ventures, Montazeri understands the complexity of building high-velocity, high-integrity platforms.

He also knows that speed alone is never enough.

From Regulatory Complexity to Strategic Velocity

Montazeri sees regulation not as a barrier, but as a design constraint.

“In the U.S., companies can experiment and build new products with fewer initial legal constraints, facilitating faster innovation and speed to market,” he explains.

“On the other hand, the EU’s AI Act imposes stringent regulations, particularly on high-risk AI applications.”

That contrast plays directly into how Liberis deploys AI across geographies. While American markets offer an environment for rapid iteration, European expansion demands extra care around compliance, especially as legal interpretations shift between countries.

According to Montazeri, maintaining technical flexibility and regulatory literacy in tandem is one of the keys to scaling responsibly.

GenAI, Embedded Finance, and the Data Advantage

Much of Liberis’ innovation now hinges on generative AI—not as a gimmick, but as a core infrastructure layer.

“We’re leveraging GenAI to enhance our services for merchants across various platforms in the U.S.,” says Montazeri.

That includes processing bank statements and extracting key financial information, but it also means tapping into unconventional signals: social media sentiment, reviews, and behavioural data.

“Traditionally, our credit decisioning models relied solely on structured data. Now, by incorporating large language models, we can analyse unstructured data, enhancing the accuracy and depth of our credit assessments.”

This intelligence is embedded directly into their underwriting and pre-approval engine. Built on over ten years of proprietary business data, it powers fast, paperless funding decisions across a wide merchant spectrum.

Small sellers on eBay and multimillion-pound enterprises receive appropriately calibrated experiences, from fully automated flows to high-touch service.

Liberis’ Create Journey API plays a major role in distribution. With a single integration point, partners can offer tailored, pre-approved capital to their SMB customers at critical moments—ahead of peak trading periods, tax filings, or anticipated cash flow dips.

The technical simplicity of this integration has been central to its widespread adoption.

Designing for Scale, Trust, and Modularity

Montazeri’s API philosophy is clear: keep it flexible, keep it compliant. “The revenue-based finance space isn’t static,” he says.

“We’re launching multiple new products this year, so the pricing and integration pathways need to be coherent.”

This coherence is about more than code. Embedded finance partners face an increasingly fragmented compliance landscape—especially in the U.S., where even the language on a contract signature button can trigger regulatory scrutiny.

Liberis bakes compliance directly into the experience, allowing partners to scale without worrying about local legal tripwires.

Beyond flexibility, Liberis also offers customisation. APIs are built to serve the partner’s brand, their tone, and their customer segments.

That level of modularity is what allows their embedded finance proposition to scale from salon booking apps to global payments platforms.

Strategic Depth in Build vs Buy

With a growing footprint in the U.S., Montazeri is candid about where Liberis chooses to innovate versus integrate.

“We build proprietary technology where it gives us a clear competitive edge—like our forecasting algorithms,” he says.

For commodity infrastructure, they turn to market leaders. “We use Formance for ledger infrastructure. That lets us focus on what differentiates us.”

That focus is increasingly on real-time insights. Open banking, while variably regulated across regions, remains a powerful tool for Liberis.

When combined with AI-driven document parsing, it enables a full-spectrum understanding of merchant finances, without interrupting the customer experience.

And while competitors emerge weekly, Montazeri believes their lead is defensible: “We have a decade’s worth of granular business performance data. That’s a moat you can’t fake.”