Author: Marielle Mekkaoui

Guest Post by Ershad Jamil | Former CGO, ServiceTitan

AI Shouldn’t Just Automate Work. It Should Help Businesses Get Paid.

Vertical SaaS companies were built to meet the discreet operational, workflow, and regulatory needs of a specific industry, like healthcare or construction. With the rise of embedded payments, these software companies soon became payments platforms.  Now, the question for Vertical SaaS platforms is how to leverage AI to help your customers become payments driven revenue engines. 

While AI and automation can significantly improve industry-specific work deliverables – from scheduling appointments to generating industry-formatted proposals, those applications focus on reducing administrative overhead or simplifying workflows. What would be even more valuable? Expediting how quickly a business gets paid. That’s where the Vertical SaaS companies will become Vertical AI companies and truly differentiate themselves. 

For years, software platforms have treated payments as the final step in a workflow. The job gets completed, an invoice gets generated, and eventually someone gets paid. AI gives us an opportunity to rethink that sequence. Instead of viewing payments as something that happens after the workflow, they should become part of the workflow itself. The next generation of Vertical AI companies won’t simply automate operations. They’ll help customers get paid faster—and in doing so, create entirely new revenue opportunities for themselves.

Every AI Workflow Should End With a Payment

No matter the industry, most service businesses follow a remarkably similar customer journey. A customer requests a service. A quote is generated. An appointment is scheduled. The work gets completed. An invoice is created. Payment is collected.

Today’s AI products are becoming incredibly effective at improving nearly every operational  step leading up to payment. AI can answer inbound calls, qualify prospects, recommend pricing, schedule technicians, summarize job notes, generate estimates, and even draft invoices. But in many cases, once the invoice is generated, the workflow simply stops.

(I’ve written before about how this gap between operational and financial workflows slows down cash flow.)

Imagine an AI sales agent preparing a quote for a homeowner. Instead of emailing a proposal and waiting for a response, the AI presents financing options, answers questions, and captures a deposit the moment the customer approves the estimate. Or imagine an AI scheduling assistant booking a service appointment. Before confirming the visit, it automatically secures the required deposit, reducing cancellations while improving cash flow. After the work is complete, the AI reviews technician notes, generates an invoice, explains the charges, answers customer questions, and securely collects payment before the conversation even ends.

In each case, AI isn’t replacing the payment infrastructure. It’s eliminating the friction that normally exists before the payment occurs. The faster businesses convert completed work into collected cash, the healthier those businesses become.

Better Customer Outcomes Create Better Platform Economics

This shift has implications that extend well beyond customer experience. Historically, software companies monetized subscriptions. In the past 10+ years, vertical SaaS companies embedded payments and began participating in payment volume generated on their platforms. As Brad Weekes of Software Equity Group says, “If you give me a pure SaaS company versus a SaaS plus payments company with the same strong financial metrics, I’m all over it.” Vertical AI companies have an opportunity to take that model one step further.

Every time AI helps a customer close another job, capture another deposit, recover another payment, or reduce the time it takes to collect an invoice, the software platform creates measurable economic value for its customer. If payments are embedded directly into those AI-driven workflows, the platform benefits alongside its customers.

Revenue becomes directly aligned with customer success. As customers process more payments, collect cash faster, and improve their businesses, the software platform grows with them. That’s a fundamentally different business model than simply charging another monthly subscription. You’re no longer monetizing software usage—you’re participating in customer outcomes.

The Next Generation of Vertical AI Platforms

Over the next several years, I believe we’ll see a growing number of AI-native software companies build products that don’t stop once work has been completed. They’ll own the entire lifecycle—from customer acquisition and quoting to scheduling, payment collection, reconciliation, and financial operations.

The most valuable AI won’t simply answer questions or automate administrative work. It will help businesses improve cash flow, accelerate collections, and generate more revenue.

Here’s a view of how AI will change the revenue collection workflows for Vertical AI companies:

• AI quoting → instant pay
• AI scheduling → deposit capture
• AI service completion → auto-billing

As founders think about building the next generation of vertical AI companies, payments should no longer be viewed as a separate feature that’s added later. They should be considered part of the product from day one. Payments become the mechanism that converts AI-driven activity into measurable business outcomes.

None of this is easy to build. Embedding deposits, invoicing, financing, and reconciliation directly into an AI agent’s conversation requires real financial infrastructure — money movement, compliance, reconciliation — sitting underneath the product, not bolted on top of it. 

That’s the layer companies like Payabli exist to provide: Pay In, Pay Out, and financial operations built to be embedded into AI-native experiences from day one, so platforms can focus on the workflow instead of rebuilding payments from scratch. Get that infrastructure right, and the result isn’t just better software — it’s a platform that helps customers complete more work, collect more revenue, and improve cash flow, while creating a powerful new monetization engine for the software company itself.

The next generation of Vertical AI companies won’t simply automate business workflows. They’ll automate business outcomes.

Guest Post by Ershad Jamil | Former CGO, ServiceTitan

Most payment problems aren’t payment problems. They’re customer experience problems.

Businesses don’t usually struggle because customers are unable to pay. They struggle because customers don’t pay immediately. Invoices get buried. Payment links are hard to find. Questions go unanswered. And collections teams spend days chasing customers who were ready to pay the moment they got a clear answer.

Having launched payments businesses at ServiceTitan, BuildOps, Otter, and several other vertical software companies, I’ve seen this pattern repeat across every industry. The bottleneck is almost never the payments infrastructure. It’s the customer experience that sits in front of the payment.

The Gap Between Customer Communication and Payment Collection

Traditionally, customer communication and payment collection have existed as separate workflows. A customer receives an invoice, ignores it, receives a reminder, has a question, waits for an answer, and eventually makes a payment. Multiple systems, departments, and interactions are often involved before money is collected. The result is a poor experience for both the business and the customer.

Businesses want to get paid faster. Customers want quick answers and an easy way to complete transactions. Yet many organizations still force customers to leave a conversation, search for a payment portal, navigate multiple screens, or wait for a response before they can pay. In fact, 42% of businesses cite the lack of supplier or customer portals as a significant payments challenge. (PYMNTS). The longer the journey, the lower the conversion rate and the slower the collection cycle.

One lesson I’ve seen repeatedly across vertical SaaS is that the most successful payments businesses don’t simply process transactions. They remove friction. The reason products like ServiceTitan Payments, BuildOps Payments, Toast Payments, Shopify Payments, and others have been successful isn’t because they move money differently. It’s because they make paying dramatically easier. The best payment experience is one where the customer barely has to think about the payment experience at all.

AI Is Bringing Customer Experience and Payments Together

AI-powered chat and voice agents are beginning to eliminate the gap between customer communication and payment collection. Instead of sending an invoice and hoping for a response, businesses can now engage customers in real time. An AI agent can proactively reach out, answer questions, explain charges, resolve concerns, and provide a payment link within the same interaction.

Imagine receiving a text message that says, “Your invoice is ready. Would you like to pay now?” 

The customer asks a question about a charge on the invoice. The AI agent explains the service performed, answers follow-up questions, and instantly presents a secure payment option. The payment is completed without the customer ever leaving the conversation. What previously required multiple emails, phone calls, reminders, and follow-ups can now happen in a matter of minutes. The payment itself hasn’t fundamentally changed. The customer experience has.

Embedded Payments Become More Powerful Inside Conversations

Embedded payments have already transformed how software platforms monetize transactions. The next evolution is embedding payments directly inside customer interactions. Whether through SMS, web chat, voice conversations, customer portals, or AI agents, payments can become a natural extension of the conversation itself. The goal is no longer simply to process payments efficiently. The goal is to remove every unnecessary step between customer intent and completed payment.

When customers can ask questions, receive answers, and complete a payment without switching channels or navigating additional workflows, collection rates improve, payment timing accelerates, and businesses get access to cash faster. The fewer clicks, redirects, and delays involved, the higher the conversion rate and the faster the business gets paid.

The Future of Payments Is Faster Cash Flow

For the last decade, the payments industry has focused on optimizing payment processing. The next decade will be about optimizing payment collection.

The companies that win won’t simply build better payment infrastructure. They’ll build better payment experiences. They’ll recognize that every payment is part of a customer journey: reducing friction, answering questions instantly, and making it effortless for customers to complete a transaction the moment they’re ready.

In that world, customer experience becomes a revenue driver. Better experiences lead to faster collections, lower operational costs, higher customer satisfaction, and healthier cash flow. The future of payments isn’t just fintech, it’s the convergence of AI, customer experience, and payments into a single, frictionless workflow.

So what should businesses expect from the next generation of embedded payments platforms?

They should look for partners that provide:

• An AI agent trained on your business that can answer customer questions about invoices, estimates, balances, financing, and payment options in real time.
• Multi-channel engagement across SMS, email, web chat, voice, and customer portals—meeting customers where they already communicate.
• Embedded payments inside the conversation, allowing customers to review, approve, finance, and pay without leaving the workflow.
• Deep integration with your vertical SaaS, ERP, CRM, accounting, and field service systems so every interaction has context.
• Automated collections and follow-up, using AI to remind customers, resolve objections, and reduce days sales outstanding (DSO).
• Actionable insights into payment bottlenecks, customer behavior, and collection performance to continuously improve cash flow.

The companies that embrace this shift will discover a simple truth: Better CX → Faster Cash.

By Lau Linares, Lead Product Designer at Payabli

Picture this. You are at the store with a cart full of groceries, paying from the store’s own app, steering the cart with one hand and scanning items with the other. The checkout process is going smoothly: tap, tap, tap, payment method selected, card already on file. Then you notice the CVV field sitting empty and waiting for manual input. Damn!

So now, in the middle of a flow that was supposed to take seconds, you have to pull your cart to the corner, dig through your purse, and find the physical card you only hopefully remembered to bring. An experience that felt effortless a second ago has quietly fallen apart in your hands.

That single moment is what I want to talk about. The best payment experience is the one you never notice, and most of the time the reason we do notice is that something asked us to work harder than we should have, or honestly, harder than we want to (human laziness is a real thing).

What “disappearing” actually means

When I say a payment should disappear, I am not talking about hiding it or rushing it. I am talking about a flow that is fully there and working while the person using it barely feels its weight, with no friction, no broken steps, and none of that sinking “wait, do I really have to enter all of this again?” that turns a quick task into a chore.

Paying should feel like a single tap. Once you have lived inside something like Apple Pay or Tap to Pay, the traditional payment form starts to feel like a relic from another era. That is exactly why, at Payabli, the team has been building Tap to Pay into a dedicated SDK, one that turns an NFC-enabled iPhone into a payment terminal with no extra reader, no dongle, and no hardware at all, embedded directly inside our partners’ own apps. Working alongside engineering on it has only made me more convinced of the point: the bar today is the quiet absence of that long form asking for your full name, your card number, your CVV, and your zip code one more time, as if you had never been here before.

Everything I believe about this comes down to one idea that is almost embarrassingly simple: set and forget. A platform worth trusting should remember you.

The form is only the surface

Payment flows are one of the most used patterns in the entire world, and they are also, somehow, one of the most confusing. Even when every product is asking for the same handful of things, each one asks in a completely different way, stretching across one step or five, scattering buttons wherever they happen to fit, and rarely telling the user what comes next or why a particular field is even there. The styling changes from product to product while the underlying experience gets quietly ignored.

This is where I see platforms fool themselves, convinced they have modernized payments because they added a saved card or a shinier button. But storing a card and actually delivering ‘set and forget’ are two very different things. A flow that keeps your card on file yet still demands the CVV on every single purchase, exactly like my grocery story, has done the technical work while letting the design betray the person it was supposed to serve.

A lot of what passes for modern payment UI is really just a prettier version of the same form, dressed up with new colors and rounded corners while keeping the same four fields underneath. The question worth asking was never how to style the form, but whether the form needed to be there at all.

Trust is earned across the whole relationship

Here is the part that tends to get skipped: invisibility only works once trust has already been built. The flows that feel like magic feel that way precisely because the company behind them earned that credential long before you reached the checkout. A platform that has not yet earned the same trust cannot simply borrow the button and expect the feeling to come along with it.

And trust reveals itself most clearly at the scariest moment of any flow, the second right after you hit pay. What is actually running through someone’s mind is fear in its plainest form: where did my money go, am I about to be charged twice, do I need to wait, what just happened?

When you press “Pay” and the screen answers with “Something went wrong” instead of a clear, calm confirmation, the spell breaks and the trust goes with it. That is why designing payments has so little to do with the form itself, and so much to do with whether the platform is reliable enough that the fear never has a chance to surface.

What I want our designers to carry with them

Confidence was never something you build by adding steps. It grows out of the boring and invisible work of storing the right data, remembering the user, and confirming clearly and immediately that the money moved. Get that right, and the payment disappears in the best possible way.

So my take, as the designer behind a lot of these flows, is to stop polishing the form and start questioning it. Kill every moment where we ask people to re-prove something they already handed us, and treat returning users like we actually know them, because we do.

The magic was never the button. The magic is the moment someone taps “Pay” and feels absolutely nothing, because somewhere along the way they stopped worrying and simply trusted that it would work.

Gracias por el cafecito. Now go delete a form field.

In our last article, we explored why payments matter when it comes to your company valuation.  Now we’re going to dig into the details about how strategic buyers will evaluate your embedded payments.  We’ll cover the baseline and standout metrics they want to see and how you should plan your embedded fintech approach to meet those expectations.

Invest in your payments proof points

“It’s a lot easier to sell a payments story when there’s actual revenue. Buyers want proof points—not just a narrative.”

You need to demonstrate that payments is not just a capability, but a proven monetization stream.  What this means is showcasing real adoption within the install base and increasing penetration over time.

Real adoption means tracking payment volume over time.  Showcase how it is trending.  Dig into the cohorts over time.  

Stop measuring payment penetration as a snapshot. Start measuring it as a cohort.

Most platforms look at payment penetration today and call it a day. But that number tells you almost nothing on its own. The real question is: what did your cohort from three years ago look like when they signed on, and how has that group grown since?

Cohort analysis shifts the conversation from “where are we now” to “are we actually getting better at this.” Are onboarding improvements moving the needle? Is a new pricing model driving faster adoption? Are targeted campaigns pulling more volume through the platform over time?

Track penetration by cohort, and you stop guessing. You start seeing exactly which levers work, and which ones are just noise.

Download the Payments Cohort Analysis Template →

Finally, you need to own your metrics up and down the P&L. It’s not only about total payment volume and penetration rate, it’s knowing your net take rate. You need to demonstrate real ownership over the net revenue line item.

Your Best-in-Class Payments & SaaS Structure

If you’re still debating how to structure your payments into your Vertical SaaS foundation, Brad is certain there’s a winning structure.  You want to showcase both predictable revenue and a growth upside.  That’s why this model wins:

• Strong SaaS foundation 
• Payments revenue layered on top
  

“SaaS sells seats and workflows—but payments monetizes activity. The customer can grow, and you’re doing nothing, and still generating more revenue.”

This approach de-risks revenue, enhances valuation clarity, and it balances stability and expansion.  It shows the most holistic view of your business.   

If you’re an earlier stage company, you’ll require a heavier SaaS base.  As you scale, you’ll likely need to meet a minimum SaaS floor to ensure buyer confidence.  At this stage, you should be working towards a 50/50 revenue split between recurring SaaS and transactional payments.  As you continue to grow, buyers are likely going to put an even higher value on payments revenue.  As Brad explains, “We try to make the argument that payments revenue can actually be more valuable than contracted SaaS—because it grows with customer activity.”

Characteristics of Top-Performing Embedded Payments Companies

Brad has seen a range of companies come through the pipeline over ten years at Software Equity Group and knows what good looks like. 

“The perfect company is one that’s had payments revenue for three or four years, where you can see a steady cohort of growth and consistency, and improved retention over time.”

Here’s what the top-performing companies all bring to the table:

• 3–4+ years of payments history
• Consistent cohort growth
• High payment penetration
• Strong retention metrics
• Payments deeply embedded in workflows
• A Strong Financial Profile:
  • Strong Rule of 40
  • High gross margins
  • Efficient growth (balanced burn)

If you meet these performance standards, you’ll earn strong interest from private equity groups.  You’ll also be likely to have more competitive deal dynamics and reach your premium valuation potential. 

“If you give me a pure SaaS company versus a SaaS plus payments company with those characteristics—I’m all over it. I know I can get the PE market really excited.”

Why Vertical SaaS Founders Should Act Now

Embedded fintech is becoming a standard, even an expectation, for vertical SaaS companies. 

Keep in mind that mission-critical products will always command higher multiples.  There is power in niche markets as well – as long as your product is a “must-have” not a “nice-to-have.” There’s a great opportunity in being number one in a small TAM.  With niche dominance and payments, you’ll have strong defensibility.

 Brad sees a number of high-value verticals on the horizon, including:

• Real estate
• Healthcare
• Government
• Manufacturing
• EdTech
  

As the market continues to emphasize efficiency and monetization, keep these elements in mind as you build your embedded payments offerings and plan your exit strategy:

• Traction beats vision when it comes to valuation
• Deep integration beats surface-level add-ons
• The best financial model combines SaaS stability and payments upside

By following this guidance, you’ll build a stronger business and create a more compelling exit story.

Payabli can be your partner to accelerate faster time to market, improve monetization and ensure a scalable embedded payments infrastructure.  Schedule a demo with our payments experts today.