Category: Industry Insights

Preparing for the Agentic FinTech Future: Payabli’s AI-Native Transformation

Posted on November 20, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Industry Insights, Meet the Team

I’m Ankita, AI Product Lead at Payabli. I came into fintech from outside the industry, which means I ask a lot of “why do we do it that way?” questions. Here, I write about building AI systems that actually work—for our team, our customers, and the emerging world of agentic fintech.

When I joined Payabli six months ago, the company had already embraced AI with an impressive toolkit—ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, and more. Teams were actively using AI for writing, brainstorming, and research, signaling a strong foundation and a real appetite for innovation.

But I also saw an opportunity to go further. While people were using AI tools, they weren’t yet experiencing the transformative upside. Many workflows still relied on manual processes begging for automation, and teams wanted clearer direction on how AI could fundamentally reshape the way fintech work gets done.

Fast forward six months: we’ve built a suite of AI agents operating across the organization, contributing to more than 24 hours of manual work saved every week. We’ve consolidated our toolset to streamline learning, training, and sharing of best practices. And we’ve begun laying the groundwork for what we believe is the next frontier in the industry—agentic fintech, where autonomous systems handle operational complexity so humans can focus on strategy, relationships, and innovation.

This is how you evolve into a truly AI-native organization.

Start With a Clear Picture: Assessing Real AI Adoption

You can only fix what you can measure, so I started by getting a clear picture of Payabli’s AI usage.

Through surveys, conversations with team leads, and benchmarking with industry counterparts, I discovered that 75% of the company was using AI automations daily – a strong starting point. However, employees were working across various AI tools, and that fragmentation was holding us back. Training was inconsistent. And most importantly, teams were focused on surface-level use cases instead of the deep automation and integration work that would deliver real impact.

Automate the Pain Points First

My approach to demonstrate the latent value of AI was simple: identify the most time-consuming manual processes, automate them, and build a portfolio of proof points. Often people aren’t opposed to AI adoption – they just don’t even realize it can solve their specific problem.

I started with the low-hanging fruit – the repetitive, time-intensive tasks that were taking up hours of employee time and built tools to automate them:

Chargeback AI Agent: Handles routine email responses, collaborates with human analysts on complex chargeback cases, and tracks action items – reclaiming hours previously spent on manual work.
Engineering Ticket Monitoring: Automates the monitoring of support tickets to ensure high-quality descriptions that speed up engineering output.
Sales Lead Qualification Tool: Automatically evaluates new customer leads against our criteria and notifies the sales team directly in their email inbox

These AI automations became our proof points. Everyone could see the tangible impact – colleagues reclaiming hours each week, faster response times, higher quality outputs – all within their existing tools. More importantly, it shifted the conversation from “Can AI help?” to “What should we automate next?”

Build AI Literacy, Not Just AI Tools

As important as it was to build automations, it was equally critical to create shared understanding around how AI should be used across the company. You don’t become an AI-native organization by deploying tools alone – you get there by ensuring every employee knows how and when to use AI to accelerate their work.

To support that shift, I created comprehensive internal AI documentation that outlines how we use AI at Payabli, including:

Guidance on when to use different AI assistants — for research, analysis, content creation, or structured workflows.
Instructions on leveraging our integrated workspace tools, including web search, database search, and project management.
How to create specialized AI agents with custom instructions and knowledge bases
Examples and frameworks employees can follow to identify automation opportunities in their own workflows.

The goal was not just to share information, but to instill an automation-first mindset across the organization. Instead of stopping at low-hanging fruit, employees now have tools and frameworks that help them consider where AI can meaningfully speed up processes or improve quality.

AI literacy isn’t a one-time initiative – it’s a cultural shift. By documenting, training, and creating space for experimentation, we gave every employee the confidence and skills to ask a powerful question: “How can AI make this faster?”

That’s when the real transformation began.

Turning Internal AI Wins Into Customer-Facing Innovation

AI automation delivers incredible value for internal teams, but the real opportunity is when you can extend that value to customers and enhance your product. Coming into fintech with fresh eyes helped me identify where we could make the biggest impact using AI virtual assistants.

I scoped several AI-powered features currently in development for Payabli’s 2026 production release, including:

Analytics AI Agent – “Amigo,” Payabli’s embeddable chatbot, helps SaaS platforms quickly ask questions about transactions, identify trends, and find ways to improve their business.
Vendor Enablement AI Agent – Helps merchants pay vendors faster by using an AI voice agent to encourage vendor enablement and determine payment preferences.
Risk Scoring AI Agent – Machine learning models to score incoming transactions with an AI agent on top that conducts initial reviews and surfaces high-priority items for analyst investigation.

The key is identifying the highest-leverage areas for AI automations – not just adding it where it looks impressive. To effectively lead Payabli towards becoming an AI-native organization, I prioritize opportunities based on potential time savings, competitive differentiation, customer need, and strategic alignment.

Envisioning the Future of Agentic Commerce

Building for today isn’t enough – a big part of my role is anticipating where the industry is headed and positioning Payabli to lead that shift.

The agentic commerce wave is coming. AI agents will soon handle complex purchasing decisions autonomously – but there’s a problem: while e-commerce is racing to become AI agent-ready, the services industry isn’t getting as much attention. Service merchants lack the API infrastructure and tooling that would make them discoverable and transactable by AI agents.

That’s the gap we’re filling. We’re developing a strategy to ensure service-based businesses have what they need to participate in this shift – from merchant enablement toolkits to new payment token infrastructure designed for agent-driven transactions.

The AI-powered features we’re building now – risk scoring agents, vendor enablement voice agents, analytics capabilities – aren’t just standalone products. They’re building blocks for a future where payments infrastructure is intelligent by default and services are as accessible to AI agents as consumer products are today.

The possibilities ahead are endless, and we’re still early. Creating the mindset shift where every employee starts by asking “how can AI help?” has positioned Payabli to become a leader in AI-native payment infrastructure as the fintech industry continues to transform. There’s tremendous potential ahead for how we continue infusing AI into our product and organization – and we’re just scratching the surface.

Escape the Haunted Maze of Vendor Payouts and Find the Sweet Path to Profitability with Payabli Ghost Cards

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Industry Insights, Product

Managing vendor payouts is one of the most overlooked opportunities for SaaS platforms to drive profitability. The right payout strategy can transform operations, improve vendor relationships, and unlock new revenue streams – but only if you’re leveraging the full range of modern payment options available.

At Payabli, we offer comprehensive payout solutions to match your vertical SaaS platform’s unique needs – from traditional Virtual Card, ACH, check, and wire transfers for one-time payments, to our innovative Ghost Cards for recurring vendor payments.

Ghost Cards are multi-use, virtual debit cards specifically designed to automate ongoing vendor expenses while generating interchange revenue with every transaction. For SaaS platforms managing embedded payments, vendor disbursements, or supplier payouts, Ghost Cards turn what was once a cost center into a profitable revenue engine.

We created this fun, Halloween-themed infographic to help you navigate the payout maze. Every vertical SaaS platform faces the same choice: which payment method fits which use case? Traditional methods have their place, but for recurring vendor payments, Ghost Cards are the clear path to automation, enhanced controls, and meaningful monetization.

Download the infographic here.

10x Impact: Inside Payabli’s Documentation Revolution

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Developer Relations, Industry Insights

Six months into joining Payabli, I had already migrated us to a new documentation platform, integrated AI-powered chat, and started filling the gaps in our documentation. 24 months later, we’ve transformed from sparse, founder-run docs into hundreds of pages of content, over 200 documented API endpoints, six auto-generated SDKs, and multiple example applications.

This wasn’t about throwing bodies at the problem. For most of this journey, I worked solo. Even now, we’re just two people. The 10x improvement came from ruthless prioritization, smart tooling decisions, and building systems that scale without constant human intervention.

Here’s what actually worked.

Choose tools that let you innovate, not tools that need babysitting

The first major decision was migrating to a new documentation platform within three months of starting. The previous setup couldn’t support where we needed to go.

I wanted flexibility without being on call. At a previous job, I’d maintained self-hosted documentation, and it was miserable—I was spending time on package updates and infrastructure instead of actually improving docs. I knew I didn’t want that again, at least not until we had a much larger team.

We chose managed solutions that gave us room to innovate without the operational burden. This single decision freed up countless hours to focus on content, architecture, and automation instead of keeping the lights on.

The platform needed to support our vision and support custom components, sophisticated information architecture, and give us the ability to move fast. It delivered on all of those. The tradeoffs are some limitations on customization, but we’re also spared dealing with PagerDuty for a documentation site.

Build automation for everything you touch twice

When I found myself manually updating card components across dozens of pages (and making typos in links and titles) I knew it was time to automate. That’s when I started building our documentation CLI.

The CLI has become central to how my team operates. It eliminates entire categories of manual work and human error. It’s a living tool that we frequently add to and subtract from as our needs change.
Some examples:

Automatic component generation: All the card components in our docs are generated automatically based on frontmatter in our pages. Change a page title, and the cards that reference it update automatically. No more broken links or outdated references.

Diagram synchronization: We use sophisticated text-based diagramming, and our CLI includes automated checks that update the generated SVGs whenever the diagram source changes. We automated it so we no longer forget to update the images when the source changes.

Changelog automation: When I change our API definition, I run a command that writes the changelog entry and flags whether it’s a breaking change. This triggers the right SDK builds automatically.

These aren’t flashy features. They’re boring infrastructure that compounds over time. Every manual task you automate is time you get back for higher-leverage work, and mistakes you never make again. I want to use my brain on big problems, not little tasks.

Integrate AI where it actually helps

We integrated Inkeep early, and the chat bot has delivered an 80-100% deflection rate every month. Customers can ask questions like “build me a config for this service,” and the chat generates working configurations from our documentation.

But the real value isn’t just answering questions. I read every chat conversation and analyze how customers ask for help. This reveals gaps in our docs that I wouldn’t see otherwise. When I notice patterns, I update the documentation to address those questions proactively.

The AI chat has become a continuous feedback loop: customers ask questions, I identify documentation gaps and read customer feedback, I improve the docs, and future customers find answers faster. It’s transformed self-service for our customers and made our documentation measurably better.

Hire for potential and trajectory, not just experience

Eighteen months in, I hired Elijah, my first team member. I made a choice: I technically needed a writer to help take some of my workload, but instead I hired a junior developer who I could train to write.

I wanted someone who would grow into a developer relations role. I needed someone who could hit the ground running to build SDKs, create example applications, talk to developers, and understand their needs at a deep level. That meant I needed an extroverted developer first, writer second.

It was challenging. He was very junior, and I had to teach him about the payments industry and technical writing fundamentals. But, at the 90 day mark, he’d already shipped resources that would be difficult for a non-developer to create. The best part is that none of the resources he created required anything from other teams.

Elijah’s role here helps my team execute quickly on building enablement resources.

Treat information architecture as a competitive advantage

When I say I focused on information architecture (IA), I mean I obsess over navigation, our controlled vocabularies, content categories, URLs, keywords, and more. Prioritizing IA has been central to our ability to scale because good IA is scale.

Good IA means customers can find what they need quickly. It means new content fits logically into existing structures. It means the documentation grows in an organized way instead of becoming a sprawling mess.

This isn’t something you do once. It’s continuous work as your product evolves, as you add content, and as you learn how customers actually navigate your docs. We recently put a lot of work into reconfiguring the entire documentation site to use Fern’s new product switcher, because that feature made it easier to organize our own content by audience type.

Measure what matters, then read between the lines

Beyond the AI chat analytics, I use PostHog for product analytics on the documentation site. This shows us how people interact with different elements, which pages aren’t performing well technically (slow to load, component errors), and where people get stuck.

We track GitHub stars for our SDKs. We monitor standard web analytics for visits and engagement. But qualitative analysis like reading actual chat conversations, looking at heatmaps, or watching how people navigate, often reveals more than the numbers alone.

Metrics tell you what’s happening. Understanding why requires digging deeper.

Work with the team you have, not the team you wish you had

The biggest ongoing challenge is working with internal teams who are stretched thinner than we are. It’s hard to be proactive and reach out to teams who may not be able to prioritize reaching out to us.

This is still something we’re navigating. I’ve made looping us in on work frictionless (just add a label to a ticket and the Doc team appears). My team has adopted the QA team’s tools so we can self-service more information and test our docs. Our automation efforts helped because we could do more with less.

You can’t change how busy other teams are. You can only change how much you depend on them having spare time to help you.

Would I do anything differently?

No. I built our docs program the way Payabli needed it done, given our constraints, resources, and goals. Not every approach works in every context.

If you’re a solo documentarian or a small team trying to scale impact, here’s what mattered most for us at Payabli:

Pick your infrastructure carefully. Choose tools that let you focus on high-leverage work, not maintenance. We love our stack, and you should too.

Automate relentlessly. Every repeated manual task is technical debt. Build the tooling to eliminate it.

Hire for the gaps you can’t fill alone. Think about what skills will unlock the most value, not just what’s easiest.

Treat information architecture as ongoing work. It’s not a one-time project. It’s how you prevent your docs from collapsing under their own weight as you scale.

Build feedback loops. Use AI, analytics, and conversations to understand where your documentation is failing customers, then fix it.

We went from founder-run docs with missing pages and outdated content to hundreds of pages, 200+ documented endpoints, six SDKs, and multiple example applications. We did it with two people because we built systems that scale for Payabli.

That’s how you 10x a documentation team: not by 10x-ing headcount, but by 10x-ing leverage.

If you enjoyed these insights on how we’re leveling up our docs, why stop here?
Check out Payabli’s Developer Documentation to see it all in action — cleaner guides, smarter structure, and the little details that make a big difference for platforms and developers building with Payabli.

The Silent Shift: How AI Is Transforming Embedded Payments

Posted on September 9, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Industry Insights, Payabli

“We won’t see a singular moment where AI ‘takes over.’ It’s already happening—gradually, silently—and by the time we realize it, it’ll be everywhere.”
— Johnny Mejias, Head of Engineering at Payabli

The Invisible Transformation

While headlines debate whether AI will revolutionize finance, SaaS platforms are already experiencing the quiet reality: it already has. Every time your users receive payment suggestions during onboarding, invisible AI is working in the background. This includes blocking fraud attempts and automatically handling overnight reconciliation. It protects your platform’s reputation and lowers your support burden.

The most profound technological shifts don’t announce themselves loudly. They embed themselves so seamlessly into your platform that you only notice their absence. In embedded payments, this invisible transformation is reshaping how SaaS platforms monetize and serve their customers in ways that drive both revenue and retention.

Common Misconceptions About AI in Fintech

AI is transforming embedded payments, but the conversation is often clouded by myths and misunderstandings. Let’s break down the most common misconceptions and explore the real potential of AI in payments:

Misconception #1: AI in embedded payments is just about chatbots and customer-facing features.

“People often frame AI in payments only through the lens of payers and merchants. But the bigger opportunity is how it protects and optimizes the relationship between businesses themselves.” — Johnny Mejias, Head of Engineering at Payabli

The reality is far more sophisticated. Customer-facing AI gets a lot of attention. However, the real change happens at the platform level. Here, invisible AI improves your operational intelligence, strengthens compliance monitoring, and optimizes resource use.

Consider how AI enables your payment infrastructure to automatically detect unusual transaction volume spikes across your merchant base, predict which integrations might fail based on historical patterns, and dynamically allocate processing resources before your users experience bottlenecks.

Instead of hiring additional analysts to monitor thousands of transactions manually, AI systems can flag anomalies, prioritize support tickets by urgency, and even suggest resolution paths. This changes your support model from reacting to problems to improving the platform before issues arise.

Misconception #2: AI must be visible to be valuable.

“AI is quietly reshaping payments behind the scenes—automating risk checks, streamlining onboarding, and reducing fraud—all without anyone needing to click a button.” — Reilly Catrambone, Software Engineer at Payabli

The most effective AI implementations in payments are the ones your users never interact with directly. Consider address auto-completion during merchant onboarding. When your users start typing “123 Main St” and your platform instantly suggests the full address with zip code – that’s AI working invisibly.

Your merchants experience faster onboarding and reduced friction, but the machine learning models powering that suggestion engine remain completely hidden, seamlessly integrated into your existing UX.

At Payabli, we take the same approach internally. Tools like Amigo, our chat-based AI assistant, work behind the scenes to help our internal teams gather insights, simplify workflows, and speed up response times. This layer of invisible AI is made to help humans, not replace them. It shows that some of the best innovations are the ones you cannot see.

Misconception #3: All AI payment solutions are created equal.

“Our advantage is in the depth of our data. We don’t just have transaction volume—we understand vertical nuance. That’s what lets our models make smarter, context-aware decisions.” — Alex Finan, AI Engineer at Payabli

Many SaaS platforms think that AI features are the same. They believe one machine learning model is just as good as another. The reality is that AI is only as intelligent as the data it learns from and not all payment providers have the same quality of training data.

While the broader payments industry races to implement AI features, at Payabli we focus on depth over breadth to leverage unique data advantages to build more intelligent, context-aware systems that understand your specific vertical needs.

This vertical-specific intelligence means our AI doesn’t just process your transactions – it understands the business context behind them. Where generic payment processors see transaction volume, we see the relationships, workflows, and patterns unique to your industry, enabling more accurate risk assessment and better user experiences for your specific customer base.

The Vertical Intelligence Advantage

While many providers rely on one-size-fits-all AI models, the real impact comes from context-aware intelligence tuned to the realities of each vertical. SaaS platforms don’t operate in generic payment flows. What looks normal in field services might appear risky in healthcare, and vice versa.

Real-World Applications Across Verticals:

Healthcare SaaS: Detect subtle anomalies in patient billing cycles, reduce false declines on recurring reimbursements, and enforce compliance checks without friction.

Field Services SaaS: Predict seasonal payment spikes, optimize mobile transactions, and prevent fraud tied to technician misuse.

Education Platforms: Align AI to academic calendars for recurring tuition payments, minimizing payment failures and reducing disputes.

HOA & Property Management: Forecast cash flow gaps, identify at-risk homeowners before they miss payments, and trigger proactive reminders to maintain financial stability.

Platforms that pair data depth with vertical nuance will lead the way in embedded payments. At Payabli, this focus shapes how we apply AI to fraud prevention, reconciliation, and revenue optimization – helping platforms deliver smarter, more resilient payment experiences.

What’s Next: AI Capabilities That Will Redefine Embedded Payments

Looking ahead, several AI capabilities are poised to fundamentally reshape how embedded payments work:

1. Automated Operations and Reconciliation

“AI is going to change the game when it comes to reconciling payments with bank flows. We’re talking about full automation of operations that used to require the work of entire teams.” — Johnny Mejias, Head of Engineering at Payabli

Traditional reconciliation requires manual review of transaction records against bank statements—a process prone to delays and errors. AI-powered systems can automatically match payments, identify discrepancies, and resolve most issues without human intervention. This isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about enabling real-time financial accuracy at scale.

2. Intelligent Risk Management & Fraud Agents

The next evolution in AI fraud detection goes beyond pattern recognition to proactive risk orchestration. AI agents will analyze transaction characteristics, merchant behavior, and external signals to make risk decisions in milliseconds. Whereas today, these decisions need skilled analysts and hours of work. By analyzing millions of transactions, these systems learn what “normal” looks like across different verticals, enabling instant response to anomalies.

At Payabli, we’re already implementing this vision through our advanced Fraud Risk Engine, which combines rule-based controls with machine learning models for both supervised fraud detection and unsupervised anomaly detection. The system automatically enforces dynamic transaction limits, velocity checks, and risk parameters while learning from each interaction to improve accuracy.

What makes this powerful for SaaS platforms is the ability to customize AI fraud detection. This can be done for each partner or industry. It ensures that your platform’s unique risks are understood and protected without causing problems for real transactions.

3. Self-Service User Empowerment

“In five years, embedded payments won’t just be about moving money. It’ll be about giving merchants self-serve tools powered by AI to grow on their own.”
— Ankita Chowdhry, AI Product Lead at Payabli

The future of embedded payments extends beyond transaction processing to business intelligence and growth enablement for SaaS platforms. AI will provide your platform with insights about payment patterns across your user base, optimization recommendations for improving conversion rates, and automated tools that help both you and your merchants improve cash flow and customer experience without additional development resources.

Join the Conversation

The AI transformation in embedded payments is far from complete. As AI technologies mature and new capabilities emerge, the most successful platforms will be those that prioritize thoughtful implementation over flashy features.What’s the biggest AI shift you see coming in payments? Tag us @Payabli to join the conversation and shape the future of intelligent payment infrastructure.

Curious how it’s already transforming the industry? Book a demo to see AI-powered payments in action.

Integrated vs. Embedded Payments: What’s Best for Your Vertical SaaS?

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Blog, Industry Insights

In the ever-evolving world of vertical SaaS platforms, choosing the right payment strategy can be a make-or-break decision—not just for platform growth, but also for customer experience and monetization. Two terms often used in this conversation are integrated payments and embedded payments. While they may sound similar, the difference is profound—and so are the benefits of getting it right.

In this post, we’ll break down the distinction between integrated and embedded payments, and explain why embedded payments are the gold standard for vertical SaaS platforms looking to scale efficiently and profitably.

What Are Integrated Payments?

Integrated payments refer to the approach where a SaaS platform connects to a third-party payment provider (such as Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net) using APIs or plug-ins. While the integration enables payment functionality, the actual experience—like merchant onboarding, transaction monitoring, or settlement—is still handled largely outside of your platform.

Characteristics:

Merchants often sign up with the third-party provider directly.
Users may be redirected outside the platform for onboarding or dashboards.
The SaaS company has limited control over the user experience and monetization.

What Are Embedded Payments?

Embedded payments go a step further by deeply integrating the entire payment experience within the SaaS platform. From merchant onboarding and KYC, to accepting payments, managing payouts, and delivering insights—everything happens natively in the software interface.

Fully embedded payments within your platform mean that merchants onboard, transact, and access real-time reporting without ever leaving your software. This ensures a seamless, consistent experience that feels like a natural part of your product—not an external add-on.

This model is often powered by becoming a Payment Facilitator (PayFac) or by partnering with a PayFac-as-a-Service provider.

Characteristics:

Seamless, native onboarding and UI
Full control over branding and experience
Monetization opportunities through payment revenue
The platform owns the merchant relationship

Why Embedded Payments Win on User Experience

For vertical SaaS platforms, user experience is everything. Embedded payments dramatically enhance the merchant journey and unlock new business value in ways integrated payments simply can’t.

1. Frictionless Onboarding

Say goodbye to third-party forms and redirection. Merchants can sign up and start accepting payments right inside your platform—often within minutes.

2. Unified UI and Experience

The payment flow stays consistent with your platform’s design. This creates a branded, trustworthy experience for your users.

3. Faster Time-to-Revenue

While integrated options may involve multi-day approval processes, embedded payments often enable instant and/or bulk onboarding and activation—meaning your users start transacting sooner.

4. Deeper Data Visibility

With embedded payments, your platform owns the entire data flow—transaction history, user behavior, payout activity—which means better analytics and smarter customer engagement.

5. New Revenue Streams

Rather than handing over valuable payment margins to third parties, you capture a share of the transaction revenue. This high-margin income can transform your SaaS business model.

6. Streamlined Compliance (with the Right Partner)

PayFac-as-a-Service solutions help you deliver a native experience without taking on the full regulatory or administrative burden of being a registered PayFac yourself.

What to Look For in an Embedded Payments Provider

If you’re ready to embed payments into your SaaS platform, the provider you choose will have a massive impact on both your product experience and your bottom line.

Here are four key things to look for:

1. Unified Pay-In and Pay-Out Capabilities

A common limitation among many embedded payment providers is the inability to support both pay-ins and pay-outs under one roof. This can create friction when trying to manage sub-merchants, service providers, or vendor payouts. Choose a provider that bridges both sides of the money movement—ensuring faster settlement, seamless fund distribution, and better cash flow control.

2. Flexible Integration Options

Your development team shouldn’t have to force-fit your platform into rigid SDKs or templated flows. Look for providers that offer:

Modern, modular APIs
Webhooks and event-driven architecture
Clear documentation and sandbox environments

This allows you to tailor the payment experience to your platform’s design and business logic.

3. Hands-On, Expert Support

Payments can be complex—but your journey shouldn’t be. The right provider offers proactive, strategic guidance from discovery to go-live, and everything in between. That includes:

Technical integration support
Merchant onboarding optimization
Compliance and risk workflows
Ongoing product and go-to-market strategy

Beyond launch, you should expect responsive, hands-on support from experts who understand your industry. The right partner will help you and your customers resolve issues quickly, optimize operations, and provide guidance tailored to your vertical—whether you’re serving contractors, gyms, law firms, or property managers.

This kind of support reduces risk, accelerates go-live, and builds long-term confidence in your payment infrastructure.

4. Cost and Pricing Transparency

A strong payments partner doesn’t just present pricing—they help you understand it and turn it into a strategic revenue stream. Look for:

Transparent rates and no hidden fees
Your partner should clearly explain interchange and processing costs, what’s being charged, and why—so there are no surprises.
Flexible monetization options
Whether you absorb fees, pass them on, or bundle them into your pricing, you should have control over how payments contribute to your bottom line.
Simple, easy-to-read billing
Avoid confusing or opaque statements. Clear, itemized billing builds trust and streamlines reconciliation.
Tailored pricing strategies by vertical
The right provider helps you set pricing that fits your market—allowing you to control margins, define terms, and capture revenue in ways that align with how your customers buy, whether you’re serving contractors, law firms, fitness studios, or beyond.

For vertical SaaS platforms, payments are more than a back-end utility—they’re a strategic lever for growth, retention, and monetization. While integrated payments may offer a quick start, embedded payments create long-term value through a smoother user experience, stronger brand ownership, and deeper monetization opportunities.

Choosing the right partner is just as important as choosing the right model. With the right embedded payments provider, your SaaS platform won’t just process payments—it will own them.

Want to learn more about embedding payments in your vertical SaaS platform? Let’s talk – we’d love to help you unlock the next layer of growth.

Bring Digital Wallets to Your SaaS Platform – Without the Hassle

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Blog, Industry Insights, Payabli, Product

Apple Pay and Google Pay are table stakes. But embedding them into your vertical SaaS stack? That’s where Payabli gives you the edge.

Online checkouts are evolving, and fast. Your SaaS platform’s customers and their end users expect the ability to pay with popular digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. The question is not whether your platform should support digital wallets. It is about how quickly and easily you can do this, without putting extra work on your team or delaying your roadmap.

Most providers make digital wallet integrations harder than they need to be. Payabli doesn’t.

The Invisible Work of Wallets: Why Most Solutions Fall Short

Bringing Apple Pay and Google Pay to your SaaS platform usually comes with a heavy list of technical requirements:

Complex key and certificate management
Manual merchant onboarding
Integration of encryption libraries
Custom API work and PCI-level configurations

It’s not just a checklist—it’s an obstacle course.

While others give you the tools and walk away, Payabli handles the entire digital wallet stack on your behalf. As a registered Payment Service Provider (PSP) for Apple Pay and Google Pay, we handle the hard work for you so you don’t need to build, manage, or maintain it yourself.

Think of Payabli as your digital wallet infrastructure-as-a-service—built for scale, speed, and simplicity.

Digital Wallets, the Payabli Way: A New Standard of Simplicity

Payabli is redefining what it means to support Apple Pay and Google Pay for browser-based, card-not-present transactions. Here’s how:

One Step, Platform-Wide Enablement

Activate wallets across all merchants at once, with new merchants automatically onboarded. No extra work required.

Fully Abstracted, Fully Managed

With our low-code digital wallet solution, we handle key management, encryption, tokenization, and certificate handling. This means you or your developer teams don’t have to manage burdensome configurations, libraries, or compliance tasks.

Secure & Compliant by Default

Every wallet transaction is PCI Level 1 compliant, encrypted, and tokenized out of the box. No security shortcuts, no risk of falling out of scope.

Fastest Way to Start Accepting Digital Wallets

Start accepting wallet payments in under one week with Hosted Payment Pages – no code required. Want a more integrated experience? Our low-code Express Checkout UI with embedded components gets you live in as little as two weeks.

Built-In Advantage: What PSP Status Means for You

Most solutions require the SaaS to own and operate the technical plumbing for Apple Pay and Google Pay. This includes acting as the Merchant of Record, registering for digital wallet programs, and managing cryptographic keys—none of which are fast or easy.

Because Payabli is a registered PSP of Apple Pay and Google Pay, we handle this for you.
No waiting on approvals. No merchant-specific configurations. No friction.

Your team stays focused on building products. We take care of the rest.

Get Started Today – Deliver the Checkouts Your Merchants Expect

Enabling digital wallets shouldn’t feel like a build-your-own adventure. With Payabli, you can deliver the modern, embedded payment experience your merchants want—fast, securely, and without any technical overhead.

Contact our team today to get started — or explore our developer docs to see how easy integration can be.

How Payabli’s AI Investment Is Powering the Developer Experience — Introducing the MCP Server and the Future of AI Payment Infrastructure

Posted on July 8, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Developer Relations, Industry Insights, Uncategorized

Your AI assistant’s payment expertise.

When we announced our $28M Series B funding, we shared our vision for the future of payments—one where AI plays a central role in how developers build and interact with payment infrastructure. Today, we’re bringing that vision to life with the launch of the Payabli MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server—the first of several AI-powered tools that mark the beginning of a new era in AI payment infrastructure and fundamentally change how developers integrate with our platform.

The Problem We Set Out to Solve

Every developer building with payments APIs faces the same frustrating workflow: code for a few minutes, switch to documentation, search for the right endpoint, copy code samples, switch back to the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), repeat. This constant context-switching kills productivity and slows down innovation.

We knew AI could solve this, but existing AI coding assistants lack the deep, real-time knowledge of payment systems that developers actually need. Generic responses don’t cut it when you’re handling sensitive financial data and complex compliance requirements.

AI Payment Infrastructure: Investment in Action

The Payabli MCP Server represents exactly the kind of AI innovation we promised investors and developers. Instead of building another chatbot or documentation search tool, we created something fundamentally different: a direct pathway between AI assistants and our live payment infrastructure.

We’re also early adopters of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an emerging standard for connecting AI assistants to external data sources. By staying ahead of this technology curve, we’re ensuring that developers on our platform get access to the most advanced, context-aware AI tools as they become available.

Here’s what makes it revolutionary:

Real-Time Documentation Sync: Your AI assistant accesses the same live API references in the Payabli Docs – no outdated examples or deprecated methods.
MCP-Powered Payment Intelligence: Your existing AI agents can leverage our MCP server to deliver precise, context-aware guidance about the Payabli API, including payment flows, compliance requirements, and more.
Zero Context Loss: Developers never leave their IDE. The AI brings Payabli expertise directly into their development environment.

What Developers Are Building

Early adopters are already using MCP to accelerate development across various industries:

Construction software platforms implementing contractor payment workflows
Educational technology companies setting up subscription billing for course platforms
Government software providers integrating secure payment processing for public services
HOA management platforms building automated dues collection systems
Field Services software processing mobile payments for service appointments

Why AI-Enabled Payment Infrastructure Matters for the Industry

In today’s fintech landscape, many companies are bolting on AI as an afterthought – typically in the form of customer service chatbots or surface-level analytics dashboards. But these limited implementations miss the bigger opportunity: rebuilding the developer experience from the ground up with AI at the core.

We’re pioneering a new category: AI-native payment infrastructure. Instead of simply making payments “AI-enabled,” we’re flipping the paradigm—making AI development payments-native. This approach deeply integrates payment capabilities into AI systems, opening up transformative possibilities for automation, personalization, and scale.

As early adopters of Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an emerging standard for connecting AI assistants to external data sources – we’re staying ahead of the curve. MCP ensures that developers working within our platform can seamlessly build intelligent, context-aware payment applications using the most advanced tools as they emerge.

By embracing these AI-first principles, we’re not just improving fintech infrastructure—we’re reshaping the future of how AI and payments work together.

The Developer Impact

What excites us most isn’t the technology – it’s what developers will build with it. When integration friction disappears, innovation accelerates. We’re already seeing:

Faster time-to-market for payment features
Reduced errors with AI-guided implementation
Higher quality integrations with built-in best practices
More experimentation with advanced payment capabilities
Reduced technical debt from cleaner, AI-guided implementations

Getting Started

Already using Payabli? Try the MCP Server and start building with AI-powered integrations today.

New to Payabli? Book a demo to see our embedded payment infrastructure and AI-powered developer tools.

This is just the beginning of AI-powered development at Payabli. Stay tuned as we continue rolling out more AI-powered tools.

Why SDKs Are a Game-Changer for Embedded Payments

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Developer Relations, Industry Insights, Uncategorized

Building payment infrastructure is hard. Integrating it into your SaaS platform shouldn’t be.That’s why we built the Payabli Software Developer Kit (SDK) for C#, Go, Java, PHP, Python, TypeScript and Ruby – a tool that gives developers everything they need to build embedded payment solutions quickly, reliably, and without the typical headaches of custom integrations. Whether you’re launching new features or scaling your platform, the right SDK isn’t just a convenience – it’s a competitive advantage.

The Problem: Payment Integration Slows Teams Down

Let’s face it: developers have better things to do than wrangle complex APIs, debug authentication flows, or troubleshoot errors after production. Payment integration, while essential, can often drain business resources. It takes time, introduces risk, and pulls engineers away from core product work.

This becomes even more painful as your company scales. Custom-built integrations tend to break, APIs change, and the surface area for bugs only grows.

The Payabli SDK Solution: Build Once, Launch Fast

A well-designed SDK changes the game. Instead of spending weeks building and testing a payment flow, developers can compose straightforward methods and go live in hours. The SDK takes care of the heavy lifting, so your team can focus on building the features that move your product forward.
Check out how our Payabli SDK improves both speed and developer experience:

Accelerate Development
Quickly embed authentication, payment initiation, and API calls with just a few lines of code so you can get up and running faster.
Catch Issues Early
Includes built-in error handling and retry logic that automatically flags issues before production – saving time and ensuring smoother launches.
Works With Your Tech Stack
Designed for modern back-ends across C#, Go, Java, PHP, Python, and TypeScript – no rewrites or awkward workarounds
Build Fast from Sandbox to Production
Production-ready in hours instead of weeks building a custom API integration, so you can launch confidently without rewriting your payment logic later.

Why It Matters

An SDK is more than just a shortcut. It’s a developer quality-of-life upgrade.

By simplifying the most repetitive, error-prone parts of building embedded payment solutions, the Payabli SDK gives developers confidence and control. It reduces mental overhead, cuts down on bugs, and lets your team focus on building what actually moves the needle for your business.

In short, it makes shipping payments feel as seamless as any other modern developer task – which is exactly how it should be.

Who It’s For

We designed this SDK for high-growth SaaS and ISV platforms looking to embed and monetize payments. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling across verticals, the Payabli SDK is built to support you every step of the way – in whatever language your team works in.

If developer velocity is key to your success (and let’s be honest – when is it not?), then this is the tool you’ve been waiting for.

Ready to Build Smarter?

Our SDK is fully self-serve and ready for you to explore. Just head to the Payabli Developer Docs to start building embedded payment solutions.

Interested in helping us make the best developer experience in payments? If you have ideas, questions, or want to be part of upcoming user research, we’d love to hear from you at docs@payabli.com.

Why KYC and KYB Matter for SaaS Platforms Embedding Payments

Posted on May 22, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Blog, Industry Insights

What is KYC and KYB?

KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business) are regulatory and compliance processes that SaaS platforms—especially those offering embedded payments or financial services—must follow to verify the identities of their users or the businesses using their platform.

Why KYC and KYB Are Required for Sub-Merchants Using Embedded Payments

When your customers begin the onboarding process to accept payments through your SaaS platform, it’s not uncommon for some merchants to pause at the merchant application. “Why do you need my Social Security Number? My business address? Why all this information?”

This is a common question from businesses new to embedded payments. What many do not realize is that opening a merchant account is a form of credit. Just like applying for a working capital loan, processors and financial partners must verify who they are working with to manage risk and protect the payment ecosystem. Ironically, most businesses provide even more data for a loan without question.

If they are willing to provide this information to borrow money, they should feel just as confident doing so to get paid.

1. KYC and KYB Are Required for Payment Compliance

Embedding payments means operating within a regulated financial ecosystem. Payment processors, sponsor banks, and card networks are required to follow strict anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) laws.

These requirements are not just good practice. They are based on legal precedent. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) requires financial institutions to detect and prevent financial crimes. The Customer Identification Program (CIP), which is part of the USA PATRIOT Act, mandates that institutions verify the identity of anyone opening a financial account.

As a result, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) protocols are essential. When your SaaS platform embeds payments, you participate in this regulatory framework. Not adhering to these standards can lead to compliance violations and reputational risk.

2. Reduce Risk with Strong Merchant Onboarding

Omitting KYC and KYB checks opens the door to fraud, chargebacks, and potential legal consequences. Bad actors, fake companies, or high-risk entities can threaten your entire payments infrastructure.

Think of a merchant account as a credit arrangement. If a payment is processed and later disputed or refunded, the liability often falls back on the platform. That is why it is critical to perform identity verification and business validation up front.

3. Build Sub-Merchant Trust Through Secure Onboarding

It is natural for users to hesitate when asked for sensitive information. But a secure and transparent onboarding experience builds trust. Sub-merchants want to know they are part of a stable and legitimate system, especially when handling large transactions or customer payments.

KYC and KYB practices reassure your customers that:

Their payments will not be delayed or blocked by compliance issues
Their data is being handled securely
Your platform can scale with them safely

Just like a loan approval process adds credibility, a professional merchant onboarding process shows that your platform takes security seriously.

4. Modern KYC and KYB Flows Improve User Experience

There was a time when compliance slowed down onboarding. That is no longer the case. With API-driven KYC and KYB flows, platforms can deliver a fast, user-friendly experience without cutting corners on compliance.

Today, embedded payments providers can collect and verify necessary data in the background, enabling merchants to start accepting payments quickly while satisfying legal and regulatory standards.

5. KYC and KYB Help Protect Revenue from Fraud and Loss

Improper onboarding leads to financial risk. Fraud, chargebacks, and non-compliance fines can directly affect your revenue and ability to operate.

In this context, KYC and KYB serve as protection for your platform. The same way a lender verifies a borrower’s creditworthiness, your platform must verify merchants to prevent downstream losses and keep the system safe for everyone involved.

How Payabli Supports KYC and KYB for Embedded Payments

Payabli helps SaaS platforms embed payments securely and efficiently. Our underwriting engine evaluates merchant applications against a range of regulatory and risk criteria to ensure compliance from day one.

We customize the onboarding process based on business type and transaction profile. For example:

A platform serving fitness studios processing $50 per month will have lighter requirements
A platform serving roofing contractors processing $5,000 per transaction will require more extensive verification

Here is what we collect during the onboarding process:

KYB (Know Your Business):

Legal business name and address
Employer Identification Number (EIN)
Website and service description
Business type and structure

KYC (Know Your Customer):

Full name and date of birth of beneficial owners
U.S. residential address
Social Security Number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number
Driver’s license or government-issued ID

If automatic verification fails, we request additional documents such as an SS-4 or Articles of Incorporation to continue the process. Our goal is to help you onboard merchants with confidence while staying compliant.

Why KYC and KYB Are Essential for SaaS Payments

Embedding payments means taking on the responsibilities of a financial services provider. That includes regulatory compliance and risk management. KYC and KYB are not just best practices. They are legal requirements grounded in laws like the Bank Secrecy Act and the Customer Identification Program.

By treating merchant onboarding like a form of credit underwriting, your platform can protect its revenue, earn trust from customers, and scale securely.

And next time a sub-merchant hesitates to fill out an application, you can simply say:
“If you would give this information to get a loan, why not to get paid?”

Ready to Embed Payments Securely?

Payabli makes it easy to embed payments while staying compliant.

Contact us to learn more or explore our developer docs to see how our KYC and KYB workflows can integrate with your platform.

How to Accelerate Embedded Payments Adoption with the Right GTM Strategy

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Marielle Mekkaoui - Industry Insights, Uncategorized

This is post four of a multi-post series with Ershad Jamil, former Chief Growth Officer at ServiceTitan. Ershad shares his experience in launching embedded payments for ServiceTitan to guide similar Vertical SaaS companies.

Over the course of this series, my goal has been to help other vSaaS operators think strategically about how to optimize their Payments business and drive embedded payments adoption. Even better, I hope that by sharing many of the pitfalls I encountered while building ServiceTitan Payments, you can avoid the same mistakes.

I’ve covered How to Drive Customer Growth with Embedded Payments, How to Choose the Right Payments Partner, and How to Structure Pricing to Maximize Value and Customer Adoption. It’s time to shift gears from foundational strategy and decisions to GTM execution.

Think like a business owner

When I first started building out payments at ServiceTitan, I planned the Go-To-Market (GTM) approach like I was building my own business, not adding on a product to an existing platform. By thinking about our embedded payments like its own P&L, I considered four core functions and roles:

Sales and Marketing
Research and Development
G&A
Cost of Revenue

It’s likely that you have many of these functions and roles within your SaaS company already. It’s worth asking who you can tap into and who you hire net new. To answer those questions, I always recommend stepping into the prospect’s shoes. Will your existing product marketers be able to help prospects understand embedded payments? On the sales side, are there existing AEs who could upsell this new product? Will they understand the nuances that come with payments and be able to drive embedded payments adoption? Do you expect to drive more adoption from your install base or net new customers?

At ServiceTitan, we emphasized hiring sales and customer success team members who were from the payments industry. They already understood pricing and knew the lingo (like calling customers merchants!). One of the most common mistakes I see with other companies adding in an embedded payments offering is making the assumption that their current AE team can handle the selling. Selling embedded payments is not as easy as it sounds. Don’t overlook your first, core GTM team members. Remember, you want payments to be a significant part of your business.

It’s also critical that you identify a team leader who will act like a business owner. This payments leader needs to know payments inside out. If your leader is not from a payments background, make sure they invest in understanding the space. They need to build cross-functional buy-in, establish key metrics, and manage the initial team of 3 to 12 people.

Flex your GTM team structure

When I was building out ServiceTitan’s GTM team for payments, redundancy and flexibility were key. The first three hires were sales, onboarding and support. They were all from the payments industry – they knew the lingo and processes to allow us to move quickly. Even better, each team member could each step into each other’s roles. The cross training approach gave us greater ability to scale and provided redundancy for a small team.

Of the team, the first hire focused on sales and onboarding. Once we gained traction, our next hire focused on implementation. It wasn’t too much longer after that point that we realized it was time to hire a dedicated support role. While this support specialist could sit within your company’s greater support org, it’s imperative that they work closely with the payments team. Embedded payments adoption requires specialized support – someone who knows how to handle very specific payments questions. A success manager trying to onboard a customer on payments as just 10% of work means you won’t get the right focus or adoption. And, in this ideal GTM launch team, support works in tandem with the sales and onboarding leads as one unit.

Landing your first customers

Start with the team that’s closest to your customers: Customer Success. Working closely with the existing customer success team at ServiceTitan, we identified customers who would be willing to test out our new embedded payments product. Identifying these first customers wasn’t hard, but convincing them to adopt the new offering was a little more challenging than we anticipated.

You’ll learn a lot from a small, focused customer group (just 6 at ServiceTitan!) and by dedicating almost full-time support from setup to answering ongoing questions. We discovered there were a lot of nuances in workflows that we wish we had thought about more. And, we had a few product hiccups we had not anticipated. By identifying and working with a core group of customers early, you can get more feedback, make quick changes and continue to move fast.

I would also highly recommend that you invest in support. A lot of times, we think about the product, about the sales motion and we don’t think about support as an important part of the solution. Keep in mind your end customers, especially SMBs, might already have an existing payments solution and they are likely not satisfied with their support. You want to provide a better customer journey. Give your customers the best Tier 1 support you can. Keep in mind that responsiveness matters. Invest in measuring not only NPS for your product, but also CSAT for support.

By investing in support with our first payments customers at ServiceTitan, we created strong customer advocacy. Our customers were willing to participate in webinars, be quoted in blogs and more. Your first customers are your greatest asset to win new customers.

When do you ramp for growth?

Back when I launched ServiceTitan payments in 2016, there were not a lot of benchmarks. To evaluate if we were ready to increase our GTM team investment, we asked ourselves the following questions:

Did we have a decent understanding of average volume of month of credit card, ACH or check size in general?
Were we making these customers successful?
How stable was the product? What was the volume of support requests?
What percent of our existing customer base had adopted embedded payments? Could we accelerate that adoption rate?

After nine months, we decided to double-down on our investment in ServiceTitan Payments. It was a hard decision to make. We were going to take a risk. Hire 10 more people. We might over hire, but we also knew payments could be a significant percentage of company ARR soon enough. Also, we had a strong conviction that every dollar going to our platform, not on integrated payments experience, was a dollar that could have been monetized and a customer that could have had a better experience and received better service.

It’s always a careful evaluation and balance of risk and reward when you make the decision to invest in your GTM team. Do you hire one more person as planned or go beyond plan? How much are you leaving on the table? Luckily, we had enough validation with our GTM team structure and early customer signals to double-down. Keep in mind today, you could leverage more AI and automated tooling to supplement your hiring plan.I highly recommend that once you have some data, if the opportunity is there, double down. Growing your GTM team will not only drive acquisition, but helps with gross revenue retention too.

When is the right time to talk to customers about payments?

At ServiceTitan, we made payments part of the core platform implementation lifecycle. A company goal was to get customers to adopt payments during onboarding. Part of the onboarding sequence was to schedule a conversation with a payments specialist. During this conversation, our payments team scoped their needs, gathered info, and could begin to set custom pricing. Getting customers to sign up for payments during this initial implementation period was a win for both – as it increased our payments velocity and ensured smooth onboarding success for the customer.

My top 5 keys to GTM success for embedded payments?

Be Nimble. We always thought of operating like a startup within a startup.
Dedicated, single threaded focus
The company has to be all in. Embedded payments must be adopted by all to be successful.
Sales teams and payments teams need to be aligned.
“Don’t make payments optional” during the implementation process

Stay tuned for the next & last article in this series, where I’ll cover how to continue to innovated with embedded payments, as well as layering on other Fintech to your vSaaS.