Author: Marielle Mekkaoui

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.

By Sierra Kotwicki | Product Marketer at Payabli

What a product marketer sees when a platform treats payments like a checkbox.

I market products for a living. When I joined Payabli as its first dedicated product marketer, my whole job became understanding who payments is for, what job it does for them, and how to say it so the right people actually care.

Which means I notice when something that should get that treatment doesn’t. In vertical SaaS, that something is almost always payments.

Most platforms don’t market payments. They just switch it on. It shows up as a toggle in account settings, a line on the pricing page, a “yes, we do that” in an RFP – and then everyone moves on. The work that any other product would get – figuring out who it’s for, what it does for them, how to launch it, how to prove it – never happens.

Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to. A feature is something you switch on. A product is something you do the work to understand, position, launch, and prove. And the product go-to-market work is the part I see most vertical SaaS platforms skip, because payments technically function the moment it’s enabled. It processes. A transaction goes through. It looks done. So nobody does the marketing – and then everyone wonders why merchants aren’t adopting.

Let me walk through the work that gets skipped. It’s all product marketing, and none of it is glamorous.

“Merchants” is not an audience

Once payments go live, most vertical SaaS platforms promote payments as a feature with a general announcement: “Payments are now available!” – sent to their entire merchant portfolio, identical copy, one and done.

But your merchants aren’t one audience. A solo practitioner who runs their whole business from their phone has nothing in common with a multi-location operator with a back-office team, except that they both pay you. They have different fears about payments, different reasons to adopt, different things that make them hesitate. A product marketer’s first move is to segment – to figure out which merchants have the most to gain and what specifically would move them – and then convey the different value propositions to each.

One generic blast isn’t a launch. It’s a notification. And notifications don’t change behavior.

Nobody wakes up wanting payments

This is the one I’d tattoo on every platform team if I could.

Merchants do not want payments. They want to get paid without chasing an invoice for three weeks. They want to stop reconciling two systems by hand every week. They want to stop losing a sale because the only option was “mail us a check.” Those are the things they want. Payments is just the mechanism.

Feature-thinking markets the mechanism: “We support ACH, cards, and digital wallets.” So what? Good product marketing markets the job that gets done: “Get paid the day you finish the work, not the month after.” Same capability – but one is a spec sheet and the other is a reason to care. The discipline here is brutally simple and almost nobody does it: take every payments feature you’ve got and run it through the “so what?” test until you reach something a merchant would actually feel.

Switching it on isn’t a launch

In a feature mindset, the moment the code ships, the job is done. In a product mindset, that moment is the starting line.

Adoption is its own motion, and a lot of it is product marketing: the in-product nudge at the moment a merchant would feel the pain, the activation sequence that walks them from “enabled” to “first transaction,” the milestone messaging when they hit their tenth payout. A product gets an adoption plan. A feature gets a changelog entry and a shrug.

And here’s the part feature-thinkers never get to: once you’re marketing adoption, you can actually measure which message works. Which value prop drives activation? Which segment converts? That’s message-market fit, and you only get to learn it if you treat the launch as something to market in the first place.

Your own team is your first market

Before a single merchant hears about payments, your own people have to be able to talk about it. Your CSMs, your support team, your account managers – if they can’t explain in one sentence why a merchant should turn payments on, no merchant ever will.

Payments adoption dies internally first. This is why internal enablement is product marketing, not an afterthought to it. Someone has to arm the people closest to the merchant. Otherwise the best positioning in the world never leaves the building.

Claims don’t travel without proof

The last thing a feature never gets, and a product always needs: proof. A platform will say “merchants love our payments” with nothing behind it. A product marketer’s instinct is to ask how do we know, and can we show it. Proof is what makes a claim portable. Without it, your messaging is just an assertion competing with everyone else’s assertions.

For what it’s worth, the proof we lean on at Payabli is scale: hundreds of billions of dollars moving across more than 100 vertical platforms. But the number only matters because we can point to what it did for the platforms behind it. A statistic with no story is just a feature in disguise.

The takeaway

Treating payments as a product isn’t about charging more for it. It’s about doing the work – knowing who it’s for, naming the job it does, marketing the launch instead of just shipping it, beating the status quo, arming your own team, and bringing proof.

That work is product marketing. It’s unglamorous, it’s mostly invisible when it’s done well, and it is the entire difference between payments that sit in a settings menu and payments your merchants actually adopt.

If you’re reading this thinking “we switched payments on a year ago and never really marketed it” – that’s not a problem, that’s the opportunity. Let’s have a conversation.

Guest Post by Ershad Jamil | Former CGO, ServiceTitan

Key takeaways

• As AI makes software features easy to copy, embedded finance is the most durable layer vertical SaaS can own, because it ties your revenue to your customers’ transactions, not to whether they renew.
• 88% of organizations now use AI, so a feature-only moat no longer holds.
• Embedded payments grow your revenue as your customers grow and make your platform far harder to leave.
• The strongest platforms own three layers: a system of record, embedded finance (payment acceptance, accounts payable, and payment operations), and AI-driven workflows.

For the better part of the last decade, vertical software companies operated on a relatively simple and highly effective model: build a great product, charge a monthly subscription, and scale recurring revenue. It was clean, predictable, and, for many, incredibly successful.

But that model is starting to show cracks, and AI is accelerating the shift.

Why is subscription-only SaaS losing its edge in the age of AI?

We’re entering a world where software features are easier to build, faster to replicate, and increasingly commoditized. What once required years of engineering investment can now be developed in a fraction of the time. As that happens, the durability of pure subscription revenue comes into question. If your differentiation is primarily feature-based, it’s becoming harder to defend over time.

The pressure is not theoretical. AI use inside organizations climbed from 78% to 88% in a single year, and as those capabilities spread, the features that once set a platform apart get matched far sooner. 

That doesn’t mean SaaS is going away. It means it’s no longer enough on its own.

How did embedded finance go from optional to essential?

Long before the current wave of AI, there was an emerging idea that many software companies initially resisted: embedding financial technology directly into their platforms.

A decade ago, this felt like a departure from the core SaaS playbook. Payments, in particular, introduced a very different monetization model. Instead of charging a fixed monthly fee, revenue became tied to customer outcomes. You made money when your customers processed transactions, when they got paid.

For founders used to predictable subscription revenue, that felt uncertain. It introduced complexity around compliance, underwriting, and operations. It wasn’t obvious that the tradeoff was worth it.

But over time, something important became clear. Software that helps businesses operate is valuable. Software that helps businesses make money and manage money is indispensable.

What turns a software feature into financial infrastructure?

Today, embedded FinTech is no longer a “nice to have.” It has become one of the most powerful levers for growth and retention in vertical software. When you enable a customer to accept payments, pay vendors, manage cash flow, and reconcile transactions directly within your platform, you move from being a tool to becoming part of their financial infrastructure. That shift changes everything.

Revenue becomes more aligned with your customer’s success. As they grow, you grow. As they process more transactions, your monetization expands naturally. Just as importantly, your product becomes significantly harder to replace. Financial workflows are deeply embedded, and once they’re integrated into daily operations, switching costs increase dramatically. This is why so many of the most successful vertical SaaS companies today are also, in many ways, financial platforms.

Does AI replace embedded finance, or amplify it?

There’s a tendency to think of AI as a replacement for traditional software value. In reality, it’s more of an accelerant. AI is transforming how work gets done inside software. It can automate scheduling, follow up with leads, generate invoices, and even assist in closing sales. But all of those workflows ultimately lead to a single outcome: a transaction. And transactions require infrastructure.

As AI increases the speed and volume of business activity, the importance of seamlessly handling payments, payouts, and financial operations only grows. You don’t just need to enable transactions. You need to manage them intelligently, reconcile them in real time, and provide visibility into what’s happening across the business.

In that sense, AI drives the workflow, but financial technology completes it. We go deeper on this in how AI is transforming embedded payments.

What does the modern multi-product SaaS platform look like?

What’s emerging is a new standard for vertical software companies. The most resilient platforms are no longer built around a single product or revenue stream. They combine multiple layers of value:

This combination creates a powerful dynamic. AI increases efficiency and drives more activity within the platform. Financial infrastructure monetizes that activity. And the core software anchors everything in a single, cohesive experience. The result is a more diversified business model, stronger customer alignment, and a much more defensible position in the market.

Why is payment infrastructure the unlock?

Despite the clear benefits, building financial technology in-house is not trivial. It requires navigating regulatory requirements, managing risk, supporting multiple payment methods, and building the operational backbone to handle it all. That’s where infrastructure providers have become critical to the ecosystem.

Companies like Payabli are designed to abstract away that complexity. By offering capabilities like Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops in a unified platform, they allow software companies to embed financial functionality without having to become full-fledged payments companies themselves.

This isn’t just about faster time to market, though that matters. It’s about enabling software companies to deliver a seamless, end-to-end experience for their customers, from the moment work is created to the moment money moves and is reconciled. And the opportunity sits squarely with this layer: Bain estimates revenue for software platforms and the infrastructure powering embedded finance has roughly doubled, from about $22 billion in 2021 toward $51 billion.

What does it mean to become an economic platform?

The broader shift happening right now is not just technological, it’s structural. Vertical SaaS companies are evolving from software vendors into economic platforms. They’re not just enabling workflows; they’re participating directly in the financial lifecycle of their customers’ businesses. That shift fundamentally changes how value is created and captured.

In a world where AI continues to compress the advantage of pure software features, the companies that win will be the ones that go deeper, those that own not just the workflow, but the outcomes tied to it.

AI will reshape software in profound ways. It will make products smarter, faster, and more capable than ever before. But it won’t change the fundamental reality of how businesses operate. Companies still need to get paid. They still need to move money. They still need clarity and control over their financial operations. The opportunity, and increasingly the requirement, is to bring all of that into a single, cohesive platform.

Because in the next era of software, it won’t be enough to simply power the workflow. You have to power the business behind it.

How does Payabli complete the stack?

Payabli provides that layer for vertical software companies. A single API unifies payment acceptance, accounts payable, and payment operations, so a platform can embed and monetize payments without the cost or complexity of becoming a full payments company. Platforms that have made the move see it in their numbers, from Builder Prime’s 1,000% increase in payment volume to Sunbound moving payor adoption from 50% to 90% in under a month. 

If embedded finance is the layer you’re ready to own, book a demo to see what it looks like for your vertical.

And stay tuned for my next article in the series: why the cost-reduction story is only half of it, and how AI is becoming one of the most powerful revenue levers a platform can pull.