Why Embedded Payments is a Retention Strategy for Vertical SaaS with Joshua Silver, CEO of Rainforest
Joshua Silver has spent two decades in embedded payments. Before co-founding Rainforest, he built Patient Co, a healthcare payments business scaled to billions in processing volume and tens of millions of patients, then spent several years consulting with software founders on building their payments programs. Rainforest is payments as a service, purpose-built for vertical SaaS, and in this conversation Joshua makes a compelling case that embedded payments is not just a revenue opportunity but a competitive moat.
What We Covered
- Why vertical SaaS companies are still leaving money on the table with embedded payments
- The gap in the market Rainforest was built to fill
- How payfac as a service works and who it is designed for
- Why the number of registered payfacs is shrinking, not growing
- The $5 billion volume threshold for when becoming a full payfac makes economic sense
- How Rainforest differentiates from Stripe and Adyen for vertical SaaS platforms
- Vertical-specific risk models versus general-purpose tools
- Rainforest’s real-time ledger and what it unlocks for complex payment structures
- Adding PayPal and Venmo for untapped vertical SaaS markets
- Expanding into Canada and building the playbook for international growth
- How AI is being used across the business and the rising threat of AI-driven fraud
- What success looks like for Rainforest in the next five years
Key Takeaways
Embedded payments builds a moat. Joshua’s closing point is the sharpest: once merchants are running their money through your software platform, competitors face a much harder job dislodging you. Payments isn’t just a revenue line, it’s a retention strategy.
Vertical-specific risk models matter enormously. Stripe and Adyen have to serve everyone, so their risk tooling is built for the lowest common denominator. Rainforest has built models tuned to individual verticals, and it takes the fraud liability rather than passing it to the platform.
The $5 billion payfac threshold is the new reality. A decade ago the rule of thumb was around $1 billion in card volume. Regulatory and compliance burdens have risen so sharply that Joshua now puts the threshold at $5 billion with line of sight to $10 billion before it makes economic sense to go full payfac.
A real-time ledger is a competitive differentiator. Most legacy processors are batch-based, settled overnight on mainframes. Rainforest’s ledger is real-time, enabling split payments, franchise fee hierarchies, and complex billing structures that batch systems simply cannot support.
About Joshua Silver
Joshua Silver is co-founder and CEO of Rainforest, a payments-as-a-service company purpose-built for vertical SaaS platforms. Before Rainforest, he co-founded Patient Co, scaling it to billions in healthcare payments volume before a sale, and subsequently consulted with software founders on building their payments businesses. He has been working in embedded payments for twenty years.
Transcript
Joshua Silver (00:10)
When PayFac first came out, there was this notion floating around that every vertical SaaS company was going to become a PayFac and the card brands would register thousands and thousands of PayFacs. We’ve seen over the last decade that that’s absolutely not true. In fact, the number of PayFacs is shrinking, not growing. Because it turns out that the mistake that everyone made was people thought everyone’s going to be a payfac. It turns out software companies just want to make money. They don’t want to actually be a payfac, and there’s a big difference there.
And when I was consulting, I used to tell people the rule of thumb was: if you have about a billion dollars of card volume with line of sight to several billion, let’s go talk about becoming a payfac. Like that makes sense. These days it’s a lot higher. I kind of tell people: look, if you’re doing five billion and you have line of sight to ten, by all means go for it. You’re doing anything less than that, it just doesn’t make sense.
Peter (01:02)
This is the FinTech One-on-One Podcast, the show for FinTech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. My guest today is Joshua Silver, co-founder and CEO of Rainforest, a payments as a service company purpose-built for vertical SaaS. He has been around payments for a couple of decades now.
Before Rainforest, Joshua co-founded a healthcare payments business that he scaled to billions in processing volume and tens of millions of patients before selling it. He then spent some time consulting with software founders on building their payments programs. In our conversation, we discussed why vertical SaaS companies are still leaving money on the table when it comes to embedded payments, how Rainforest differentiates from Stripe and Adyen with purpose-built risk models and a real-time ledger, why becoming a full payment facilitator rarely makes economic sense below five billion dollars in payments volume. We talk about their PayPal and Venmo integration, their expansion into Canada, and Joshua provides his vision for the next five years. Now let’s get on with the show.
Peter (02:29)
Welcome to the podcast, Joshua.
Joshua Silver (02:31)
Thanks much for having me, Peter. Great to be here.
Peter (02:33)
My pleasure. So great to have you. I like to get this thing started by giving the listeners a little bit of background. I know you haven’t been doing Rainforest for that long. So tell us some of the stops on your career to date.
Joshua Silver (02:46)
Yeah, it feels like a long time some days. We’re almost five years in, but I’ve been in the embedded payment space now for twenty years. Back in the mid 2000s, I co-founded a company called Patient Co, which was in the healthcare payment space. And that was a venture-backed business that we grew to billions of dollars and tens of millions of patients and sold it. And then I did consulting for a couple of years, helping other software founders and executives build their payments businesses, and finally, about four and a half, five years ago, got Rainforest started. I saw a huge gap in the market and really wanted to dig into that and was fortunate enough that a lot of the team from Patient Co came over with me and followed me here. And so we got the band back together.
Peter (03:28)
So what was the specific thing you saw that was the gap in the market that led to Rainforest?
Joshua Silver (03:33)
It’s a great question. So on the one hand, we had a lot of software companies that were starting to make money with payments by embedding them and processing them. And they wanted to do more and more of it. On the other hand, you had different payment providers that weren’t really providing great service. And you had a lot of legacy-scaled processors, the names that you’d know that do trillions of dollars, that have been around for a long time and run on mainframes. They have very poor technology, very poor service. They’re only competing on price. And then you have the new modern entrants like your Stripes and your Adyens of the world that have much better modern technology, but still leave a lot to be desired from a service perspective, especially for mid-market companies, and economics as well. And so what we did is we said, let’s create the best payments company for vertical SaaS platforms, where we have great technology, great service at a reasonable and fair price and commercial arrangement.
Peter (04:32)
So there’s been a lot of talk about vertical SaaS over the last six months or so and it’s a huge area. I mean, pretty much every vertical, of which there’s probably hundreds, thousands I’m guessing, has a vertical SaaS player, often multiple vertical SaaS players. Has the message gotten through to the founders of these vertical SaaS companies, or are they still underestimating payments as a revenue opportunity?
Joshua Silver (04:58)
You know, I think some are really capitalizing on it. And we actually did a benchmark study at Rainforest of hundreds of SaaS companies that we’ll be releasing soon and have more data that we can share then. But there’s a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. There are some companies that are doing a really great job monetizing, and there are some that aren’t and need to be and should be and are leaving a lot of money on the table. And so that’s one of the reasons Rainforest exists, to help bring those who have lower take rates and lower adoption up into the top right of the quadrant, if you will, where they can be making a lot more money. They absolutely should, but there’s still that big gap.
Peter (05:38)
So then how do you describe Rainforest when you’re talking to these vertical SaaS companies?
Joshua Silver (05:44)
So Rainforest is payfac as a service, or payments as a service, which essentially means that we’re registered as a payment facilitator with the card brands, which means we have full autonomy to onboard merchants and underwrite merchants and manage the risk and move the money and do the billing and all of the complex payment things. We do all that as a service for the software companies. And so if you’re a mid-market vertical SaaS company, maybe you have a couple of hundred million dollars of processing volume, you don’t want to have to think about money movement and compliance and fraud controls, all of these tough things. That’s what we do. We take that off their plate and we give them really good economics so that they make money for every single payment that gets processed through their platform.
Peter (06:30)
A SaaS company might have thousands of merchants, might have hundreds of thousands of merchants. So you are in partnership obviously with the vertical SaaS company, sending out notices to all of their merchants about being able to accept credit cards now through this vertical SaaS company. And so how are you kind of positioning it to those kinds of companies?
Joshua Silver (06:51)
Yeah, so that’s almost right. The nuance there is we’re actually fully embedded into the software platform and it’s completely white-labeled. So Rainforest is never contacting the merchants and we’re not sending it out. What we do is we help embed it inside of the product. And so best-in-class companies will have the sign-up process right when you’re signing up for the SaaS platform itself. Payments is just a step in that process, it’s not separate. And then there are approaches to do pop-ups or overlays or things like that to get the existing clients to become merchants. Of course, we can help with facilitating different marketing messages and packages and things like that. But the model you described, Peter, where we’re the ones going and soliciting these merchants, is much more of a legacy referral model. And that’s what we want to get away from because when you fully embed it and white-label it, not only do you get better adoption, you can make more money as a SaaS company. But also the user satisfaction goes way, way up, as well as churn gets reduced because it’s a fully embedded offering. And I think that is really the linchpin of embedded payments and payfac as a service.
Peter (08:00)
How do you kind of position yourself as a better alternative than going down the route of becoming a full PayFac? I mean, obviously if you want to become a full PayFac, you get better economics, but it’s a massive amount of work, I take it.
Joshua Silver (08:12)
If we rewind the clock about ten or fifteen years, when PayFac first came out, there was this notion floating around that every vertical SaaS company was going to become a PayFac and the card brands would register thousands and thousands of PayFacs. We’ve seen over the last decade that that’s absolutely not true. In fact, the number of PayFacs is shrinking, not growing, because it turns out that the mistake that everyone made was people thought everyone’s going to be a payfac. It turns out software companies just want to make money. They don’t want to actually be a payfac. And there’s a big difference there.
And when I was consulting, I used to tell people the rule of thumb was: if you have about a billion dollars of card volume with line of sight to several billion, let’s go talk about becoming a payfac, that makes sense. These days it’s a lot higher. I kind of tell people: look, if you’re doing five billion and you have line of sight to ten, by all means, go for it. You’re doing anything less than that, it just doesn’t make sense because the regulatory burden these days is so much higher than it ever was. The compliance burden is so much higher. The number of integrations you have to do is so much more expansive. There’s a lot of moving pieces there. And quite honestly, unless you’re doing literally $10 billion plus, the economics, when you factor in your fixed overhead, your upfront costs, versus your unit costs, you’re actually in a much better position to use someone like Rainforest.
Peter (09:33)
So you mentioned them already, but I want to talk about Stripe and Adyen. You’ve got Stripe Connect, Adyen for Platforms. Not necessarily built for vertical SaaS, built for merchants and sort of retrofitted into SaaS companies. What’s the difference for a SaaS company going with something that’s purpose-built for SaaS versus going with a Stripe or an Adyen?
Joshua Silver (09:57)
So Stripe and Adyen were fundamentally built for different kinds of businesses. Stripe was built for the internet economy, a lot of e-commerce and then later marketplaces. Adyen was really truly built for global brands. And they do a great job with it. Both of them have over the years retrofitted, or tried to place on top, this kind of platforms layer, Adyen for Platforms or Stripe Connect. And the reality is when you’re not purpose-built and weren’t designed for that, it makes a lot of things very challenging.
Some of the things that tend to be very challenging using those: getting good access to data. Something as simple as give me a report of which merchants I’m making money on and which merchants I’m losing money on is actually very, very difficult to pull on either Stripe or Adyen. Whereas with Rainforest, we give you the report out of the box every single month, and it has everything you’re going to want on it. It’s purpose-built.
Another big area we see challenges with is risk management. The hardest part of payments is always around risk management, preventing fraud, looking at non-delivery exposure, all the different ways that you could lose money in payments. And Stripe and Adyen, because they serve such a large market, have to take a really wide lens to it. They have to use general-purpose tools that work for the least common denominator for everybody. Because one minute they’re looking at a barber shop, and the next minute they’re looking at an e-commerce shop, and the next minute they’re looking at field services, and the next a nonprofit donation. They’re all different, and it’s very hard to apply risk tooling across verticals.
Whereas with Rainforest, we’ve built a vertical-specific risk engine. So our system knows what nonprofit donations look like. It knows what healthcare looks like. It knows what field services look like. And not only just field services, but lawn care looks very different than plumbing, which looks very different than HVAC installers that have large upfront fees and deposits. And so what ends up happening is you end up with a lot of risk challenges like holds, reserves, very punitive actions that the card processors have to take because they don’t have fine-grained tools and controls. Imagine you’re a surgeon trying to operate on someone, you want that precision scalpel. That’s what we offer, not a hacksaw.
Peter (12:18)
Okay, just to be clear then, you’re creating a custom risk model for every vertical that you serve.
Joshua Silver (12:23)
Yeah, we’ve already built that. The core engine supports all the different verticals. And then we have the ability to customize it. So for example, we do a lot of registration software for camp registration or private schools or things like that. And there’s a lot of similarities. At the highest level the model looks the same, but then you dive down into the timing patterns: private school registration is very different than camps. The seasonality is different, the amounts, the payment cadence. And so we want to look at all of those things very specifically. And that’s how we’re able to deliver much lower fraud rates. We also take the liability. So if we mess up and we miss something, we’re on the hook for it. Many of the other payment processors put the liability, the risk back onto the platform, when in reality the platform is paying for the tooling. So I tell people: you’re paying Stripe or Adyen for risk tools, and then if they don’t work, you have to take the loss. That doesn’t make any sense. We’ve put our money where our mouths are.
Peter (13:21)
In my research, I read that you were winning competitive deals over eighty percent of the time against some of the more well-funded, more established payments companies. So why do you think you’re winning, and when you lose, what’s the reason?
Joshua Silver (13:37)
So it really comes down to these three pillars. And whenever a vertical software company is choosing a payments partner, they should look at three areas. One is product and tech. The second is service. And the third is commercial and economics. And by the way, largely in that order.
From a product and tech perspective, we already talked about that we’re purpose-built for vertical SaaS companies. We have fully embeddable components and we allow software platforms to go from a cold start to a fully live program in two weeks. That includes everything from processing the payment to reporting to merchant onboarding to chargebacks, disputes, all because we have these embeddable components that are really easy to put into the system.
The second area is service. Many payment providers, whether they’re the legacy or the newer ones, offer what I call dumb pipes. Here’s an API, go process the payment. That’s it. We do that and we do it very well, but we also wrap strategic program management around it. So we have platform success managers who are going to help figure out: what should the go-to-market strategy be? How do we migrate merchants? What should your pricing be? How can we optimize pass-through fees from the card brands? There’s a lot of money that can be made when you do that properly.
And then the third area, Peter, is around economics and commercials. And it’s not just the price you pay, it’s what’s the overall amount you’re making, as well as ownership of merchant data. With Rainforest, platforms own all their merchant data. And we guarantee in our contract that we will export it. If we’re not doing our job and you want to leave us, we will give you your data. A lot of other payment processors hold that data hostage. And so imagine you’re a founder of a SaaS company, you’ve brought 10,000 merchants to a payments provider, they’re your clients, and now the payment company is saying, well, we’re not going to give you their data. It’s highly punitive. And so we’ve gone the complete opposite direction. We have the most platform-friendly contract there is out there. And because of that, we’re winning deals left and right.
Peter (15:44)
I also read you don’t have a long-term commitment, right? Like is it an open-ended contract? I mean, imagine you put a bit of work into onboarding one of these companies. What do you put in your contract?
Joshua Silver (15:54)
So there’s a couple of different models there. We do have models where it’s kind of a pay-as-you-go model, and there’s not necessarily long-term contracts. For clients who want better pricing and want us to really lean in and invest in those, then we can create a mutually beneficial contract that works for them. And typically that would have some minimums or some type of teeth in it, just to make sure that if we’re putting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of work to get this thing launched, they’re bringing the requisite volume that they said. So there’s a lot of flexibility there, and we can work with clients to figure out what makes the most sense for them.
We also have some clients that want to have a term because they want to lock in the really great pricing we’re offering them for a very long time. And so we’re willing to do many-year terms as well. It kind of just depends on what’s most important to the platform, is it price? Is it flexibility? But regardless, we always make sure that their data is fully theirs. There are no non-solicits, meaning they can take their clients with them. That’s the complete opposite of other payment partners that lock up their data and don’t let them take their merchants with them.
Peter (16:58)
Okay, so I want to dig into some news that you came out with earlier this year about adding PayPal and Venmo integration, which I thought was interesting. It’s certainly something that I know a lot of consumers like to pay that way, and oftentimes it’s difficult when this payment method is not accepted everywhere. Was this driven by your customers? Was this something that you felt was a needed addition? How does that fit into your broader product thesis?
Joshua Silver (17:28)
Well, let me answer the second part of that question first, which is: with Rainforest, software platforms integrate once into us, and then we handle all the complexity of integrating into all the different payment rails. And so when we added PayPal and Venmo, there really wasn’t any work that the software platforms had to do. They just got more payments. That’s the beauty of it. Same thing when we’ve historically added Apple Pay or bank rails or ACH. That’s very much part of the payments as a service model, we’re always innovating and the technology kind of innovates right under you, which is the beautiful thing there.
With regards specifically to PayPal and Venmo, we’re very excited about being able to partner with PayPal and Venmo, as well as PayPal Credit and PayPal Pay Later, all of the different flavors, if you will. Historically, all of these were really heavily utilized in e-commerce purchases. If you go onto most e-commerce retail sites, travel sites, you’ll see the PayPal button. Most vertical software companies, due to the complexity of the integration and the overhead of managing that, historically didn’t offer it. And so now we’re helping PayPal and Venmo get to all these untapped markets. At the same time, we’re letting the vertical SaaS companies tap into funds that consumers have stored in those different payment models and wallets, as well as reduce the time for checkout because you don’t have to enter in your bank details.
We already see this especially with field services, your lawn care guy. A lot of people just casually pay them through Venmo. Now it can all be done inside of the software platform. And so the lawn care professional doesn’t have to go and do a lot of manual data entry and mark the invoice as paid. It just happens automatically. So it’s a win-win-win for everyone.
Peter (19:19)
So on a different note, I read that you are expanding into Canada, your first international market. What does it look like from your perspective when you’re operationally launching in a new country like that?
Joshua Silver (19:35)
Yeah, as similar as Canada is, it’s also very different. The whole banking landscape is different. There’s a very different regulatory regime in Canada. They have, for example, the code of conduct for card processors, which has very stringent requirements around disclosures and things like that. So certainly we’ve been investing a lot of time to make sure that we are doing everything compliantly, but also making sure that we’re supporting everything that the Canadian market needs.
We’re excited about Canada for a couple of reasons. One, historically Canada has been very underserved with regard to embedded payments platforms, there aren’t that many there, and choice is very limited. We’re excited to give Canadians extra opportunities. And second, with regard to platforms that are based in the US, by enabling Canadian processing, it opens up a whole new market for them as well. So a lot of dimensions to unpack there, but a big effort and one we’re most excited about.
Peter (20:32)
I imagine some of your vertical SaaS clients would already operate there, right?
Joshua Silver (20:37)
Some of them do. And in some cases they’re using an alternative payments processor for Canada versus the US with us. In other cases, they may still be working with a suboptimal payment processor because they need that Canadian processing and they’ve been waiting very patiently, I might add, as we get all of our licenses and paperwork taken care of up in Canada so that we could serve them as well.
Peter (21:01)
I imagine Canada’s not going to be the last country that you expand into. Are your clients asking you for future expansion into new geographies?
Joshua Silver (21:12)
Yeah, a lot of requests come in for all of your typical English-speaking countries, Australia, New Zealand, the UK. And then from there there’s a cohort that goes into LatAm and another that goes into the European main continent. But no specific announcements on countries yet, but certainly we’re building the playbook as we go into Canada to do it again.
Peter (21:32)
Okay, so then what’s on your product roadmap? You’re looking at adding more payment rails, new features, new markets. What are you looking at?
Joshua Silver (21:40)
A little bit of all of the above. One of the core assets that we have with the business, one of our pieces of intellectual property, is our ledger system. So we built our own real-time ledger, which is very different than most payment processors that are batch-based. If you think back to the mainframes that were built in the eighties and the nineties, they all operate on an end-of-day model where you process a payment, anything before nine or ten PM gets into a batch, it’s sent to the mainframe, it processes overnight, and you get your money the next day or two days later. There’s not a lot of flexibility there to do split payments, or to do payments in different directions, or to have franchise models where you have a hierarchy and each person takes a little piece of the cut.
With our ledger system, not only are we able to have flexibility on timing, but we can also do split payments, very complex fee arrangements, billing that might be a fixed amount plus a tiered system, all these different types of capabilities are made possible by the ledger. And so this year we’re really spending a lot of time building out the surface area to expose all of the capabilities of the ledger. We’ve had some phenomenal use cases emerge from our clients asking, hey, now that you have this available, we want to build things we weren’t doing before. So that’s been a huge emphasis, as well as continuing to invest in the risk system.
Peter (23:04)
So with this ledger, I imagine that was a massive change internally for you, right?
Joshua Silver (23:09)
Well, we had that from day one. That was one of the things we invested in when we built the company, in order to be modern and accommodate all the use cases we knew we wanted to build. One of the areas we invested in was the ledger, and the other was the risk system. And so both of those collectively make us very different than any of the other payment processors out there. It’s a key reason why we’re able to deliver such high quality, reliability, and scalability, because we’ve invested in these from day one.
Peter (23:38)
So I was reading that Bain and Company projects embedded payments will exceed seven trillion dollars in total US transactions in the near future. How are you thinking about a future where there’s say ten times the current volume? How are you thinking about that from an infrastructure perspective, from a market perspective, and the broader embedded payments movement?
Joshua Silver (24:11)
Well, certainly it’s great to be operating in a market that is already massive but also growing. That’s kind of been a hallmark of my career, historically in the healthcare space, which was growing very rapidly, and now in the embedded payment space. That helps a lot with the growth. But one of the things that we did is we built the company right from the beginning. When I first raised our seed capital, I had a lot of discussions with our investors and said: unlike a lot of other companies that get to market very quickly and then you track week over week how fast they’re growing to see if you have a winner or not, I said we’re not going to have any revenue for the first year or 18 months. We’re going to be heads down building this thing because I want to build it right the first time.
We had at that point fifteen or sixteen years of experience building this at Patient Co and other companies. We’d learned a lot along the way. We knew what to build, but it was going to take time. And so building the risk system and the ledger system and the APIs from scratch all took a lot of time. And therefore, we’ve been able to scale very quickly without having to make further investments. We’ve got many, many years of runway to grow without having to re-architect the platform because we did it right from the beginning. This wasn’t our first rodeo.
Peter (25:28)
So then how are you using AI? Obviously you’ve got your risk models. I imagine that’s driven by machine learning models. But tell us a little bit about how you’re using AI internally to make your product better, more efficient, and so on.
Joshua Silver (25:47)
Yeah, really it’s across the whole business, as you might imagine. Certainly in the risk and fraud department, it’s been in heavy usage for many, many years, even before AI was the buzzword of the day. But we’re using it for development, certainly in QA, for some design. Our platform success team uses it, as well as our go-to-market team. So very different use cases, but we’ve got a very robust tool set there that we’re utilizing.
The other thing I’ll note about AI is that for as many benefits as there are, there also are some drawbacks. And one of the things we see is: as much as we have access to AI, so do the bad guys. We’ve seen an increasing number of very sophisticated attacks that are AI-generated, whether it’s fabricated documents, whether it’s brute-force attacks, all these things that historically bad guys didn’t have commoditized access to. Now you can spin up an instance of Claude or OpenAI or any of these other tools and generate a huge amount of fake things very quickly. And so we’re having to play a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game. I like to remind people: if you thought you were safe before and you took on risk and you were in a low-risk industry, you may no longer be with the advent of AI and how cheap it’s become. So just a word to the wise to focus not only on what the good things are, but also what the other implications are that need to be considered.
Peter (27:09)
For sure. Okay, last question. If we gather again in five years’ time and have another chat on the podcast, what would you consider a success for Rainforest? What are some of the milestones? What would you have done to consider yourself a major success?
Joshua Silver (27:27)
Our North Star is always two things. One, we want to generate huge amounts of revenue for our software platforms that are customers. Because not only is it revenue that’s putting money in their pocket, but it’s also making them more resilient to things like the SaaS apocalypse. If you’ve got competitors coming in, if you have this moat with embedded fintech, it’s much harder for them to displace you. And so we’re making these businesses more resilient. I think there’s a lot of altruism in helping other founders make their businesses better and more valuable.
Second, our North Star is really being the de facto payments company for vertical SaaS companies. Today we’ve made a lot of progress to that, and a lot more people know about us than did a year or two or three ago. But there are still other companies out there that have a lot of market share. And so we are really going to be the standard for vertical SaaS companies.
Peter (28:18)
Okay, we’ll have to leave it there, Joshua. Really great to chat with you today and thanks so much for coming on the show. Best of luck.
Joshua Silver (28:24)
Really appreciate you having me. It’s a pleasure.
Peter (28:32)
I want to briefly dig into a comment Joshua made right at the end there. He talked about the SaaS apocalypse, the very real threat that cheaper, faster competitors can come in and undercut your software business. His point was that if you’ve got payments embedded in your platform, you’ve built a moat. Your merchants aren’t just using your software anymore, they’re running their money through it. That’s a very different relationship and a much harder one for a competitor to disrupt.
Embedded payments isn’t just a revenue line, it’s a retention strategy, and I think more SaaS founders should be thinking about it that way. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.