The later organizing model for how ZBD’s products move value.
After developing “The Money Layer for Games” to describe ZBD’s role, I needed a way to explain how the products beneath it worked together.
The existing framework was STEP: Shop, Transfer, Earn, and Pay. Its four categories were easy to remember, but a player’s experience rarely stayed inside one of them. Earn, now Embedded Rewards, made the overlap clear. A player could receive a reward, hold the value, spend it back in the game, send it to someone else, or cash out. Explaining that path meant moving across several STEP categories.
As ZBD’s portfolio expanded, I found myself spending more time explaining the boundaries than the products. I began looking for a model that followed the player’s experience instead.
I started with two terms I knew from fintech: pay-in and payout. They described where money entered and left a system, but missed much of what ZBD could enable inside a game. Between those endpoints, players could earn, hold, spend, trade, and transfer value.
I tried calling the middle Pay Through. It completed the sequence, although the repeated use of “pay” made every action sound like a payment. For a game studio thinking about rewards, player economies, and loyalty, I wanted language that made room for all three.
Money In, Money Through, Money Out was simpler. “Money Through” gave a name to the activity STEP had spread across several product categories, while the three phases made sense without a fintech glossary.
First try
Pay-inPay ThroughPayout
Final
Money In, Money Through, Money Out
Once I drew the flow, a straight line felt incomplete. Value could enter a game, become a reward or a balance, move between players, and be spent within the game again. Some journeys ended in cash-out; others continued inside the economy.
A straight line ends at cash-out
A lifecycle keeps value moving in the game
I drew the three phases as a lifecycle to make that circulation visible. The visual helped connect ZBD’s infrastructure to the reason a studio might care about it: money movement could become part of the game experience, with the potential to support engagement, retention, and player lifetime value.
I brought the lifecycle into the ZBD Platform messaging framework and the decks used to explain the product suite. Leadership began using the same language. It gave us a way to describe the platform as a whole while allowing products to support more than one stage of a player’s journey.
The model also appears on ZBD’s public site. The homepage explains Money In, Money Through, and Money Out as one connected flow. The Embedded Accounts page uses the same language in its opening description, and the August 2026 platform launch post uses it to introduce the wider product suite. I also created the platform and product videos used across the site, giving each product a concrete picture inside that story.
Product names have since changed and the suite has grown. The lifecycle still works because it describes how money moves, leaving room for different products to serve each part of that movement.
I began by trying to make a product framework easier to explain. Tracing a player’s money through the game gave me a clearer way to see the relationships between products, and the words followed from there.
ZBD was described in several ways, including as infrastructure and as a way to make money work for games. There was no consistent answer to what the company was.
The Money Layer for Games
The phrase moved from an internal idea into ZBD’s public brand and appears on its website.
A boundary that blocks passage
A layer that lets value cross