Author: Marielle Mekkaoui

Payments used to be the differentiator. Today, they are table stakes. 

Over 60% of vertical SaaS platforms have already embedded payments, according to a survey by EY-Parthenon, and adoption continues to climb. Embedded payments work because they’re intuitive, sticky, and powerful. When executed well, payments can increase revenue per user up to 5x. 

More than 80% of the embedded-finance market remains untapped. There are massive opportunities with payouts, working capital, insurance, spend management, and embedded marketing automation. These offerings are natural extensions of how a vertical SaaS platform can solve customer problems in high-complexity, need-to-pay verticals like healthcare, field services, property management, hoa and retail. 

The real question for founders isn’t whether to embed payments—it’s how to move beyond them without losing momentum.  As Ershad Jamil, former Chief Growth Officer at Service Titan, noted in his recent article,“Moving Beyond Payments: When & How to Expand Your Fintech Stack, a lot of companies launch payments successfully—and then stop there.  How do you evolve your vertical SaaS platform from including payments as a feature into a purpose-built embedded ecosystem?

Payabli recently hosted a discussion with leaders across the embedded fintech landscape to dig into how founders can think beyond payments while staying focused on their core product and customer? 

The Biggest Misconception: We can add more embedded fintech later

Many founders and vertical SaaS platform leaders underestimate how early they should be thinking about a multiproduct strategy.  According to Ershad Jamil, “If you’re selling $50–100K ACV, you should be multiproduct from day one.”

During his time at ServiceTitan, Ershad’s team  launched nine fintech-adjacent products, which collectively grew to represent roughly one-third of total revenue. They didn’t wait for payments to reach saturation to begin exploring new products, instead, they watched customer adoption on payments as a guide and leading indicator. 

A practical rule of thumb:

• If 5–10% of customers have adopted payments, you are building momentum.
  
• That’s enough signal to start building—or partnering on—the next offering.
• You can leverage your existing payments team to fast-track the next embedded product offering.

Founders often wait for “perfect adoption” before moving forward. In reality, momentum compounds faster when platforms layer products early, leveraging existing customer trust, data, and GTM motion.

Evaluating embedded fintech: Table stakes or Value add?

When it comes to deciding which embedded fintech products to add next to your platform, many founders struggle with deciphering what’s mandatory vs. what is monetizable. In this quickly evolving landscape customer expectations are also changing rapidly, so something that was a game-changer two years ago may be table-stakes today.  

Table stakes are defined by your vertical, your customer’s daily workflows, and what competitors already provide. Two years ago, embedded payments, basic reporting and reconciliation, and some form of cash-flow visibility felt like “nice to have” features, and today they are expected. 

“Accounting is extremely complementary to payments. Customers don’t want to leave their platform to understand their money.”

— Raj Bhaskar, CEO, Tight

Accounting is a good example. As Raj Bhaskar, CEO of Tight, noted, “why hand over your customers to QuickBooks in the last mile?”  Customers are reluctant to move payments onto a platform unless it also helps them understand where the money went. Handing them off to QuickBooks breaks the experience—and increasingly feels outdated.

On the flip side, value added products unlock measurable business outcomes like faster cash flow, business growth, or reduced operational burden. That’s where categories like working capital and marketing automation come into play as accelerants. While there is an abundance of SMB focused marketing automation tools, embedding marketing into your platform brings greater convenience, data integration and visibility of actual marketing spend that wasn’t possible before. 

As you evaluate additional fintech offerings, keep in mind that AI is not a stand alone offering. Integrated AI capabilities and automations are becoming the expectation for how your platform will work as a system of action.  As Raj says, “Why open a report and drill down into the data when you could open a chat and ask what is my month over month revenue increase and what should I do next?” AI will raise the bar across every embedded product:

• Accounting that works in real time
• Marketing that optimizes itself
• Capital that’s proactive, not reactive

The question isn’t whether to add AI. It’s whether your product is intentionally designed to use it.

When evaluating if a new offering will strengthen your core platform or differentiate it, keep these questions in mind:

• What job are customers still leaving your platform to complete?
• What critical business decision are you forcing customers to make outside your platform today?
• What manual workarounds signal unmet demand inside your product?
• Does this offering increase customer dependency?
• Does this offering directly compound payments volume or retention?
• If you don’t offer this, who will your customer turn to?

Evaluating embedded fintech: Follow customer pull or competitor push?

Should roadmaps be driven by what customers ask for—or by what competitors force you to react to? Consensus among embedded fintech leaders leans strongly toward customer pull, with an important caveat. 

Customers will tell you their pain points: Cash-flow gaps, time spent reconciling books or difficulty growing revenue.  At times you need to respond to those direct pain points and at other times you need to listen to the signals. Your customers won’t always tell you what’s possible. It’s your team’s role to ask, what can we do differently?

“Customers didn’t ask us for embedded financing—but it became one of the most powerful products we launched.”

— Ershad Jamil, Former CGO, ServiceTitan

At ServiceTitan, embedded financing succeeded precisely because customers didn’t ask for it. The team understood the business, the workflows, and the opportunity to solve the pain customers had simply learned to tolerate.

The real unlock is marrying together these elements to inform your embedded fintech roadmap:

• Direct signals: Surveys, feedback, usage data
  
• Indirect signals: Offhand comments, workarounds, hack
  
• Internal conviction: Knowledge about what technology can now make possible

Keep in mind listening blindly to customers could lead to incrementalism. And, ignoring customers will lead to irrelevance. The balance is where innovation lives. As Ershad says, “Be careful to listen, not march directly – and miss innovation.”

Product Consideration: Three Offerings that Compound Payments

While there are dozens of potential fintech offerings to consider adding to your multi-product approach, three categories stand out as compelling “next steps” beyond payments.

Start thinking about not only what product to offer, but what product meets the needs of various customer segments. And, just like payments, each additional product should have its own TAM, P&L, and adoption goal. 

Accounting 

“Accounting is extremely complimentary to payments”, says Raj Bhaskar – CEO, Tight.  It extends payments, it doesn’t replace them. 

Embedded accounting provides automated reconciliation and real-time reporting. It reduces labor, increases retention, and drives higher payment volumes (hundreds of thousands of ACV). With embedded accounting, you can connect all money in and money out in one platform.

“No business owner started a company because they love managing the books. Accounting should work for you—not the other way around.”
— Raj Bhaskar, CEO, Tight

If customers are doing accounting on your platform, you’ll have great retention.  

Working Capital

Mike Barbosa – CEO, OatFi, frames access to capital as a core element of your business in this way: 

• Growth capital is the protein and nutrients.  It’s what you need to invest in long-term to grow and build strength.
• Working capital is the blood and air. It’s what’s necessary to smooth out the cash flow and thrive organically.

If your platform already helps customers manage supplier or business customer payables or receivables, embedded working capital can:

• Smooth cash flow – extend payables outstanding
• Strengthen payments usage
• Drive 20–40%+ revenue uplift, even up to 100%

If your customers have a working capital problem and can only access it through your payments tool, it will provide a significant uplift.  You can market working capital the same way as payments.  It fits seamlessly. It’s not just another product—it supercharges the ones you already have.

Marketing

At first glance, marketing may feel adjacent to fintech. In practice, it’s a force multiplier.  Marketing belongs in the fintech roadmap because growth compounds everything else.

Platforms offering marketing tools often see 20–30% adoption in year one and $1–2K ACV uplift. Their customers will replace software spend and reduce costs with agencies.  SMBs with embedded marketing could be growing double-digits and increasing payments yield.

Embedded marketing automation:

• Helps customers grow
• Makes customers stickier
• Increases payment volume as a second-order effect

“Embedded marketing is a force multiplier. Businesses that grow stay on the platform—and transact more.”
— Teddy Liu, Co-Founder, Pocketflows

GTM Strategy: Build or Partner?

The right question isn’t can you build—it’s should you. Keep your goal of speed to value in mind.

Additionally, rebuilding products like accounting or marketing would require massive investments in infrastructure. 

As Raj states emphatically, “What is the last thing you would ever want to do?  Would you want to build QuickBooks again?  I’ve never heard of a business owner raving about QuickBooks, even though it’s the market leader.”  

Teddy notes that to build marketing automation in-house, “ you would have to build connectivity, mail deliverability, compliance and more – would you really want to rebuild all that infrastructure? Is that core to your platform?” 

Instead, consider leveraging partners to embed your new offerings. Evaluate these partners based on:

• Level of internal effort required
• Proven customer references in your vertical
• Ability to support you through launch, iteration, and scale
  

4 Steps for Moving Beyond Payments in the Next 30 Days

If you’re early in this journey, start here:

1. Define what’s table stakes vs. value-add for your platform
   
2. Talk to customers about what tools they’re actually using—or what workflows they are hacking together
   
3. Map customer spend to understand share-of-wallet opportunities
   
4. Pick one next move that compounds payments

How Payabli approaches fintech security to support SaaS platforms embedding payments at scale.

Written by Emilio Sepulveda

When you’re building embedded payments for vertical SaaS platforms moving millions of dollars, security testing isn’t optional. It’s the basis of trust between your platform, your customers, and the people using it every day. That’s why, when I joined Payabli a few months ago, I was immediately impressed with how seriously security testing is taken here.

Payabli’s dedication to continuous security testing, talking about issues openly, and just the general seriousness about security is a huge deal. It’s absolutely vital in the payments world, and it’s a major win for a team this size.

What also became clear is how heavy a constant stream of security findings can feel for a small, fast-moving engineering team. Even when testing is working as intended, the volume and timing of findings can turn useful signals into noise – landing outside of sprint planning, breaking focus, and arriving without the context needed to move quickly.

The challenge is not security testing itself – it’s how that testing fits into day to day engineering work.

When continuous testing creates friction

Continuous security testing is powerful, but without structure it can create unintended friction for engineering teams:

• Findings arrive with little predictability
• Engineers are pulled into constant alert triage
• Remediation work lands outside of planned sprints
• High-impact findings compete with low-value noise

Over time, this makes it harder to focus on the work that actually reduces risk. And for SaaS platforms embedding payments, this friction doesn’t stay internal. It shows up as delayed launches, last-minute fixes, and surprise issues at the worst possible time.

The challenge isn’t security testing itself – it’s how that testing integrates with how products are built.

How we’re maturing our fintech security testing

We continue to run continuous security testing at Payabli, but we’ve changed how it shows up for engineering – and, in turn, for our SaaS partners.

Instead of testing everything all the time without context, we focus security testing on what teams are actively building. Assets, endpoints, and APIs are clearly defined and owned, and testing is mapped directly to that inventory. This ensures findings arrive with context, accountability, and clear remediation paths.

Security testing is planned around engineering sprint cycles. Teams know what is being tested, when it’s happening, and why it matters. Expectations are set in advance, and findings are reviewed together with shared understanding of impact and priority.

This approach keeps security testing continuous while making it predictable. Engineers can plan fixes, absorb findings, and reduce risk without disrupting existing workflows. For SaaS platforms leveraging Payabli’s embedded payments infrastructure, that predictability translates directly into fewer surprises and a more resilient platform.

Why this alignment matters

Effective fintech security programs ensure SaaS platforms can scale payments confidently, without compliance friction or unexpected risk. When security testing aligns with how engineers plan and build, everything works better:

• Remediation can be scheduled instead of rushed
• High confidence findings stand out clearly
• Alert fatigue is reduced
• Security feels like support, not interruption

Most importantly, risk is addressed earlier – while features are being built, not weeks before launch. That means fewer last-minute issues, smoother audits, and greater confidence as platforms scale.

The outcome

Security testing that scales isn’t about running more scans or generating more findings. It’s about focusing on impact instead of volume.

By reducing noise and aligning timing and context, security testing becomes something engineering teams rely on – not something they work around. Engineers stay focused, risk is reduced earlier, and Payabli can scale security in a way that strengthens engineering velocity rather than slowing it down.

For the SaaS platforms we partner with, this means working with an embedded payments provider whose security program is mature, transparent, and built to scale alongside your growth.

Embedded payments have evolved from a “nice-to-have” revenue booster to one of the fastest-growing opportunities in vertical SaaS – often contributing 30-50% of total company revenue within just a few years of launch. But here’s what separates the platforms generating millions in payment revenue from those struggling to gain traction: how they approach the build.

The most successful platforms treat payments as a core product, not just a feature. They recognize that delivering a seamless payment experience requires the same level of strategic investment, technical sophistication, and operational rigor as their primary software offering. And as payment volume scales – from processing a few million to hundreds of millions annually – the need for dedicated payments expertise becomes unavoidable.

So how do you know when it’s time to bring on your first Head of Payments? And what should you look for when you do?

This article addresses these critical questions and outlines how to build an effective payments team for your vertical SaaS platform, starting with your first hire: a Head of Payments or Payments Lead. We’ll cover the capabilities that matter most for this foundational role, then explore when and how to add specialized positions as your payments program matures.

The Biggest Mistake Vertical SaaS Teams Make When Hiring for Payments

Many vertical SaaS platforms start payments hiring with an impossible wish list for their first payments leader – whether titled Head of Payments, Director of Payments, or Payments Lead. They are searching for a “payments unicorn” – someone who knows everything from risk and underwriting to product, go-to-market, and compliance. That bar isn’t realistic, and it’s not necessary. 

The better question is: what do we need most right now? Before writing the job description, identify the single capability that matters most at your current stage – hiring for payment adoption and go-to-market, customer management, operations, or product. Listing every payment responsibility dilutes strategic focus and scares away strong candidates when they don’t hit every checkbox. 

Start with leadership focused on your core needs. As payments volume grows, you’ll likely add specialized roles like payments sales reps, merchant support, or a payments product marketer – but those come later, after you’ve proven the model with your Head of Payments or Payments Lead.

What to Look For In Your First Payments Hire: Your Hiring Evaluation Guide

As you evaluate candidates for your Head of Payments or Payments Lead, here are the critical capabilities that separate strong payments leaders from poor fits:

Cross-Functional Influence: Payments leaders rarely have large teams. They work across finance, product, technology, and sales without direct authority. Look for examples of aligning teams, securing product bandwidth, or enabling sales to position payments correctly – all without direct reports.

Partnership Management: Your processor relationship directly impacts success. Merchant onboarding is typically the biggest hurdle to activation. Strong candidates understand processors as true partners, maintain direct communication channels, and collaborate on complex merchant situations rather than managing them as vendors.

Merchant Relationship Building: The best payments leaders develop personal relationships that go beyond what large processors offer. Look for experience building direct merchant relationships, providing personal support, and showing up at industry conferences or maintaining direct support channels.

Data-Driven Decision Making: Strong candidates use data to identify friction, improve workflows, and drive adoption. They should talk about outcomes with specific numbers and demonstrate how they’ve taken customer feedback and turned it into actionable improvements.

What Strong Candidates Look Like (vs. Red Flags)

Strong payments leaders demonstrate:

• Excitement about successes backed by specific numbers
• Clear explanations of complex concepts across audiences  
• Deep merchant understanding and what drives adoption
• Examples of productive processor partnerships

Watch out for:

• Speaking in generalities without owning outcomes
• Overusing jargon instead of clear explanations
• No concrete metrics around adoption, retention, or boarding
• Treating payments as isolated from the broader product

How to Set Your Payments Leader Up For Success

Hiring the right person is only half the equation. Your payments leader needs:

Company-Wide Buy-In: When sales, customer success, and product support payments as a priority, payment adoption improves immediately. Without this, your payments leader can’t get the bandwidth they need.

Honest Expectations: Be transparent about where you are in your payments journey. Are you ready to commit resources, or still exploring? It’s only fair for candidates to understand your real stage and constraints.

Strong Processor Partnership: Clunky boarding processes or poor communication will sabotage even the best hire. Your payments leader needs a responsive, collaborative embedded payments partner.

Leadership Chemistry: This relationship becomes the backbone of how quickly you can scale. Find someone you work well with.

When to Scale Your Payments Team

Once your Head of Payments has established your payments foundation and proven the model, you’ll likely need additional support. Here’s when to consider new payment hires:

• Payments Sales Rep: When adoption becomes a bottleneck and your leader spends a majority of time on sales calls rather than strategy.
• Payments Support Rep: When onboarding volume and support tickets pull focus from strategic work (Note: Some embedded payments partners like Payabli offer dedicated merchant support options, eliminating this headcount need).
• Product Marketer: When you need dedicated resources for sales enablement and customer education materials

The sequence matters less than the trigger: hire when a specific function becomes a clear bottleneck to growth. When building a payments team, most companies start with leadership, add sales support next, then layer in specialized roles as volume scales.

Ready to Hire a Payments Leader? Next Steps

Before you start interviewing, answer these questions honestly:

1. What’s our most critical need right now? Go-to-market, operations, product, or partnership management?
2. Where are we in our payments journey? Early exploration, ready to scale, or looking to differentiate?
3. What resources can we commit? Sales bandwidth, product development capacity, budget, and executive attention?
4. What does success look like? Define concrete milestones – monthly, quarterly, and annually.
5. How will we support this person? Company buy-in, processor partnership, and realistic expectations?

Once you can answer these clearly, you’re ready to write a focused job description that prioritizes what actually matters, interview payments candidates against the capabilities that drive success, and build a team that will transform your embedded payments program into a lucrative competitive advantage.

Ready to go deeper? Download our complete Embedded Payments Launch Checklist for a comprehensive guide to everything you need for a successful payments launch within your vertical SaaS platform.