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.