“Can BT Group leverage its 1 million SMB merchant customer base and EE network to become a meaningful embedded payments and business services platform beyond telecoms?”
BT Group is one of the UK's oldest and largest telecommunications companies, historically focused on fixed-line telephony and broadband. The 2016 acquisition of EE expanded BT into mobile, creating the UK's largest integrated telecoms operator. In 2024, BT Group began extending into embedded payments for SMBs through its incubation arm Etc., partnering with Adyen to launch a Tap to Pay on iPhone solution — a first step toward becoming a payments-enabled platform for its one million merchant customers.