When I speak to platform leaders, two themes keep coming up: relationships and revenue. Your platform grows when your customers do. That makes payments a product and growth issue: you need to know whether your payments set-up is helping your customers get live, keep trading, and grow with you.
There’s a big opportunity here: global revenue from embedded finance is predicted to grow 279% between 2026 and 2031. Your platform can ride this wave of growth – so long as your customers know you will be there when they need you, with consistent service, incident transparency, and timely communication.
Your ability to provide that first-rate service is often dependent on third-party services, such as your payment services provider (PSP). For instance, issues such as failed payments can cause operational friction, disrupt your customer relationships, and limit your commercial control. When you focus on your customer – whether that be the small business, sole trader, gig worker, or large business – you will see how their experience of your platform directly impacts revenue, churn, and long-term growth.
Why payments are directly connected to customer success and revenue growth
Growth happens when your customers succeed – and stay on your platform. Industry benchmarks show that as software platforms scale, an increasing share of their new revenue comes from helping existing clients grow rather than acquiring new ones. Benchmarkit’s 2025 study found that, among SaaS companies with $50M–$100M in annual recurring revenue, expansion from existing customers contributed a median 58% of total new ARR.
That’s why your success depends on your ability to easily onboard customers and continually provide a smooth experience. You’ve spent years building excellent software that solves a real customer problem. It’s what you do best, and it’s why your customers chose you.
Yet, payment problems on your platform can quickly cause customer complaints and harm that hard-earned trust. No matter the cause, you will face financial consequences when your customers cannot get live, get paid or get answers. When funds are held or a payment fails, your customers turn to you – and understand your platform to be the problem. But without the detail from your payment partners and a path to resolve issues, you carry the support burden without the ability to provide clarity.
A lack of visibility into payment delays can trigger customer churn, which, of course, means loss of revenue. The time has come to recognize patchy payments capabilities as a growth risk.
Seize the growth opportunity and keep customer clarity
Embedded payments are on the rise, increasing competition between platform providers. Financial services (like payments) embedded into ecommerce and other software platforms accounted for $2.6 trillion – or nearly 5% – of total US financial transactions in 2021 according to Bain & Company, who projected in 2022 that US embedded-finance transaction value would exceed $7 trillion by 2026.
That’s because the digitalization of commerce is not going to slow down – independent creators, contractors, and entrepreneurs will continue to choose the platforms that get them onboarded quickly, keep them transacting reliably, and help them grow. And they’re not afraid to switch providers. In a recent survey, 41% of independent earners cited payment delays as a reason they had stopped, or would stop, working with a platform. That’s why customer trust is a critical indicator of your business’ near-term financial health. To maintain the customer relationship, you need to be able to provide clarity on when you will settle.
Looking at the bigger picture: if you can keep providing transparency to your customers over payment status, then you improve your chances of retention and growth.
Earn additional margin from each transaction
Payment costs can weigh heavily on your net platform margin. With the (necessary) legal, regulatory, and data protection scrutiny that comes with payments, it’s common for payment processing to come high up on a SaaS company’s operational costs. Yet mature companies now view payments as an opportunity to improve platform economics.
Consider how much control your payment model gives you over the customer experience, pricing, and the margin you retain. For independent software vendors, embedding payments can create an additional revenue line: the platform sets customer-facing rates and retains the margin added onto third-party fees. As customer payment volume grows, that revenue line can grow without selling extra software seats.
It’s an opportunity for a win-win on improving your platform margin and retaining good control over your customer relationships, while potentially avoiding the additional compliance burden that comes with certain other models of payments management.
Choose a payments model that strengthens your relationship with customers
To summarize:
- Helping your customers grow is an important route to your commercial success.
- Payment failures and unexplained delays can undermine customer trust, triggering churn and limiting platform growth.
- Lack of context and operational control in your payments setup can prevent you from resolving problems.
- Better data and more transparency lead to smoother settlements and stronger customer satisfaction.
- To ensure customer satisfaction, seek greater data transparency from your PSP and look into ways to increase operational control.
- Further strengthen platform economics by exploring whether you can earn margin from each transaction.
In short, you’re reliant on your payments partner to show you how to explain payment problems – and help you prevent them in the first place. Yet you can own the relationship with your customer without taking on every payment responsibility. It helps to look for a payments partner that suits your preferred division of responsibility for acquiring, settlement, risk controls, disputes, and compliance obligations.
You can contact our payments experts for further advice on improving your platform’s revenue within your chosen model of control.
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