If you operate a software platform, you want to ensure your merchants have the freedom to explore every possible payments setup. But if you're working with an integrated payments system rather than owning your payments stack, that flexibility may prove impossible to come by.

Engaging with your merchants takes on expanded capacity when you embed your payments stack and take ownership of your financial services infrastructure. Without the limits presented by an integrated solution, payments become a real selling point, delivering capabilities merchants will want — seamless customer experiences, speedy payment processing, and the ability to develop innovative business models.

Industries move quickly. Processes and business models that were considered cutting-edge only a few years ago may already feel outdated. Your merchants will want to add new capabilities to keep up. This may mean creating a new tipping model, accepting a payment method that didn't exist until recently, or designing a system wherein customers pay one another. When working with an integrated third-party solution, you are dependent on that provider for making upgrades and improvements.

Giving your merchants the new solutions they need can be a significant selling point for your brand, so being stuck with an inflexible integrated payments stack means you lose a positive differentiator for your software platform. By bringing payments in-house, you can customize payments experiences for your customers, implementing new features based on merchant needs and requests.

Merchants rely on having a reliable payments infrastructure for the stability of their finances and to ensure they are giving top-quality service to their customers. Pleasing customers means offering quick, reliable, and transparent payments performance. Transactions need to proceed smoothly. Each financial institution involved, from banks to processors and facilitators, verifying and approving the amounts in a matter of seconds. Companies aren't just relying on quick and reliable ways to receive funds; they also need refunds to work just as smoothly.

Not only will your merchants' customers approve of the improved payments experience you can provide with an embedded option, the merchants themselves will find a lot to like. Onboarding merchants into your embedded payments landscape makes essential processes such as settlement and reconciliation faster.

Enabling reliable and transparent processes to your merchants can be a crucial differentiator for large organizations weighing your software and a competitors'. With a fully-embedded solution, merchants' customers won't be in doubt as to the status of a transaction. Dealing with a third-party integrated provider could be frustratingly opaque for all parties involved, particularly in the area of support when challenges arise. By taking control of payments, you remove the middleman and create a better experience for your merchants and their customers.

Getting merchants to work with your software platform, to come aboard early and stick with your offerings, focus on giving those companies capabilities they can't get elsewhere. This may mean rethinking your payments strategy. Organizations today need flexibility, transparency, reliability, and agility when it comes to payments — customers won't settle for less.

Too, if merchants can combine multiple necessary functions into one, that's an additional attractive offering. Embedding payments gives you the ability to combine essential business functions such as accounting, inventory, or point of sale with a payments experience that will improve the merchant's ability to please its customers.

While offering your merchants more functionality is a good practice on its own; it is just one of the advantages that come with embedding payments. Large software platforms that process more than $50 million each year for their merchants will gain a financial edge from reclaiming the revenue that would otherwise be lost to a payments partner at a rate of $5 per $1000 processes. In a fast-growing tech landscape, companies are wondering which software platforms to align themselves with. By giving merchants the payments experience they're looking for, you become the clear choice. 

To learn more about how you can embed payments into your vertical software product, talk to a member of our team.