Embedded payments for SaaS platforms allow you to integrate payment processing directly into your product so your customers can accept, manage, and move money without leaving your application. SaaS platforms can embed onboarding, checkout, payouts, and reporting into the core user experience.

For platforms, this creates new monetisation opportunities such as earning revenue from payment volume while improving customer retention and simplifying financial workflows for end users.

The opportunity is significant. A 2024 report from Adyen and Boston Consulting Group found a $185 billion market opportunity for SaaS platforms in embedded finance, with less than 20% of that market currently addressed. IDC Financial Insights projects that nonfinancial institutions’ platforms will conduct 74% of global digital consumer payments by 2030. This is especially true for vertical SaaS platforms, software built for specific industries like healthcare, construction, or hospitality. In these businesses, embedding payments directly into the workflow creates a level of memorability and monetisation that horizontal SaaS platforms often can’t match. As platforms increasingly control more of the payment flow, embedding payments becomes a strategic growth lever rather than just a feature.

Below, we explain how embedded payments work for SaaS platforms, common implementation models, and how to evaluate the operational and monetisation trade-offs.

What's in this article:

• What are embedded payments?
  
• Traditional vs. embedded payments
  
• How embedded payments work
  
• How to embed payments in a SaaS platform
  
• Benefits of embedded payments
  
• Challenges of embedded payments for SaaS platforms
  
• What SaaS platforms are responsible for when they embed payments
  
• How to monetise embedded payments
  
• Stripe’s embedded payments solutions
  

What are embedded payments?

Embedded payments is a term for payment solutions that are built natively into a SaaS company’s product.

For independent software vendors (ISVs), vertical SaaS platforms, and online marketplaces, embedded payments are increasingly the standard rather than an optional add-on. This enables multiparty payments between platforms, their end users, and third-party sellers in a single flow.

Embedded payments allow customers to complete their transactions without leaving the platform’s website or mobile app, facilitating a convenient checkout experience.

In marketplace contexts, this often includes split payments, the automatic division of a transaction between the platform and one or more sellers or service providers. Platforms like DoorDash and Shopify rely on these to route funds accurately.

Traditional vs. embedded payments

Traditional SaaS platforms typically rely on third-party payments providers to handle transactions, sending users outside the platform to complete purchases and ceding control over the checkout experience, data, and revenue.

Embedded payments change that dynamic by bringing the entire payment experience in-house. This keeps users within the platform, gives businesses direct access to transaction data, and unlocks new revenue streams that third-party providers would otherwise capture. Third-party providers offer an easier starting point, but embedded payments deliver greater control, better economics, and an easier user experience as the platform scales.

How embedded payments work

For tech-enabled platforms, embedded payments can work one of two ways: natively or using a third-party provider.

The right approach depends on your platform type. Vertical SaaS platforms (those serving a specific industry vertical such as legal, dental, or field services) often have unique compliance, workflow, and monetization requirements that benefit from a more flexible, configurable embedded payments model. Horizontal SaaS platforms serving multiple industries may prioritise breadth of payment method support and faster deployment timelines.

Traditional payment facilitator (payfac) model of embedded payments

The traditional method of bringing payments in-house involves integrating a payment gateway or processor into the platform, allowing for smooth transactions within the platform. The platform becomes, in essence, a payment facilitator (payfac). This way of bringing payments in-house often comes with considerable startup and ongoing costs, in addition to major security and compliance considerations.

A payment gateway acts as the secure bridge between your SaaS platform and a customer’s bank. It encrypts transaction data, sends authorisation requests, and confirms whether a payment is approved or declined.

For SaaS platforms embedding payments, this process happens directly inside your product. Instead of redirecting users to a third-party checkout page, payment details are captured, transmitted, and processed in the background while maintaining security and compliance standards.

Some platforms also store customer payment credentials (such as cards or bank details) for future transactions, enabling faster checkout, recurring billing, or subscription renewals.
While the technical implementation varies by provider, the goal remains the same: allow users to complete payments within your platform while securely transferring funds between parties.

1. Payment form integration: To implement embedded payments, the platform first integrates a payment form into their website or mobile app. This form typically includes fields for the customer’s credit or debit card information, along with any other information needed for the transaction, such as billing and shipping addresses.

2. Secure data transmission: Once the customer enters their payment information, the platform uses secure data transmission methods to send it to the payment processor—typically secure socket layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) encryption. This protects the sensitive information from unauthorised interception.

3. Payment processing: The payment processor validates and processes the payment information, performing fraud checks and confirming that the customer has sufficient funds for the transaction. The processor sends the transaction results back to the platform, which uses this information to update the customer’s order status and display a confirmation message.

4. Tokenisation: To increase security, some platforms and marketplaces use tokenisation, replacing sensitive data with a unique token for use in future transactions. This lets platforms store payment information securely without transmitting sensitive data over the internet.

5. Payment gateway integration: In some cases, platforms and marketplaces also integrate with a payment gateway, which acts as an intermediary between the platform and the payment processor. Payment gateways can deliver additional features such as recurring payments, invoicing, and supporting multiple payment methods.

Embedded payments for marketplaces and multivendor platforms

If your platform handles marketplace payments or multiparty transactions, funds are often split between a platform, a seller, and sometimes additional service providers. In this case, payfac-as-a-service solutions such as Stripe Connect handle the routing, reconciliation, and compliance of split payments automatically, without requiring the platform to build that logic in-house.

How to embed payments in a SaaS platform

Embedding payments into your platform requires deliberate decisions about your business model, user experience, and operations. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Choose your model: Decide whether to build your own payments infrastructure, partner with a payment facilitator, or use a platform such as Stripe Connect. Your choice will shape your time to market, compliance obligations, and long-term revenue potential.

2. Define your payments: Set your transaction fees, markup, and any subscription or premium feature pricing. Align your pricing model with your merchant mix and growth goals before you go live.

3. Design onboarding: Build a smooth onboarding flow that collects the merchant information you need for Know Your Customer (KYC) and compliance without creating unnecessary friction. Prebuilt user interfaces (UIs) from providers such as Stripe can significantly reduce the time and resources this requires.

4. Configure payout flows and holds: Define how and when funds move to your merchants, including payout schedules, reserve policies, and any holds for risk management. Getting this right early reduces operational problems and merchant frustration later.

5. Set up disputes and support operations: Establish clear processes for handling chargebacks, refunds, and merchant support requests. The faster and more transparently you resolve issues, the stronger your merchants’ trust in your platform.

6. Launch and measure take rate, activation, and churn impact: Go live and track the metrics that matter: take rate, merchant activation, and churn impact. Use what you learn to improve your pricing, onboarding, and support operations over time.

Benefits of embedded payments

Embedded payments offer several benefits:

Growth of existing revenue

By providing a more convenient checkout experience, embedded payments increase conversion rates and drive revenue for your platform. Embedded payments can also serve as a significant competitive differentiator for platforms and marketplaces because they deliver a much better customer experience.

New revenue streams

In addition to boosting existing revenue streams, embedded payments help platforms and marketplaces unlock new sources of revenue through transaction fees, markup or revenue share, and new lines of business like instant payouts, in-person payments, lending, and more.

Greater control over customer experience

By building native payment processing functionality directly into a website or mobile app, embedded payments give platforms and marketplaces a more nuanced ability to deliver the best customer experience.

More efficient troubleshooting

Supporting multiple third-party providers for various aspects of your payments can create seemingly endless barriers—and frustrating wait times—when problems occur. Bringing payments in-house lets you fix issues faster.

Faster, cheaper implementation

Embedded payments give businesses native payments functionality without requiring the substantial time and cost of building their own infrastructure. For example, Stripe Connect lets you go live faster with a single global integration that minimises operational complexity and development resources.

Improved conversion rates

A more refined customer experience means fewer abandoned carts and more completed transactions. For direct retailers, this means more sales; for platforms and marketplaces, this means increased user satisfaction and loyalty.

Increased scalability

Embedded payments allows platforms and marketplaces to scale in both existing and new markets. Stripe Connect supports 185+ countries, 135+ currencies, and 100+ local payment methods through a single integration, including ACH, SEPA Direct Debit, and real-time payment schemes like Pix and UPI. This allows platforms to reach more customers worldwide without rebuilding their integration for each market.

Streamlined compliance

Requirements for payments facilitation vary significantly by country, business model, and transaction type. Stripe can help manage the complexity of compliance, licensing, and card network rules, so you can expand your business faster and decrease operational overhead. Stripe Connect automatically updates to help meet the latest payments compliance requirements without any changes required to your integration.

Better data and analytics

Embedded payments generate volumes of actionable data and analytics. They provide a wide range of customer and product insights, such as seasonality and preferences by market and customer segment, and fraud detection. The data and insights that embedded payments produce can power data-driven product development, optimisation, and refinement of offerings. They also offer opportunities to invest in successes and divest from weak spots.

Faster onboarding

Embedded payments with Connect cover the entire payment experience, including onboarding. Stripe users can implement prebuilt, optimised UIs or custom-built onboarding flows, making it easy for platforms and marketplaces to serve their customers quickly. Stripe handles KYC obligations for payments and helps meet other payments compliance requirements.

With Stripe’s networked onboarding, users who already have a Stripe account can onboard onto a new platform in as few as three clicks, significantly reducing the time to first payment for platforms and their end users alike.

Consolidated payments management

Embedded payments with Connect gives businesses the ability to track and manage transactions in ways that support many essential financial tasks. Stripe keeps full records of all transactions so you can easily track and reconcile payments, issue refunds, build custom reports, generate tax forms, and send funds. In the US, Connect provides gross earnings tracking and automated 1099 form generation and delivery.

Reliability at scale

During Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2025, Stripe processed more than $40 billion in transactions while sustaining 99.9999% uptime. For platforms, that kind of infrastructure resilience means your users’ payments keep running even when demand spikes.

Challenges of embedded payments for SaaS platforms

Embedding payments into a SaaS platform comes with some complexity. Compliance requirements vary by country and transaction type, demanding attention as platforms grow. Building and maintaining payments infrastructure requires engineering resources, while managing disputes, chargebacks, and fraud at scale adds another layer of operational overhead.

Onboarding friction can slow merchant activation, and pricing embedded payments competitively without compressing margins takes careful strategy. Solutions like Stripe Connect address many of these challenges out of the box. Platforms managing fraud and compliance at scale can go further with specialised tools: Stripe Radar for Platforms extends ML-based risk scoring to evaluate both transaction and connected-account risk, while Stripe Verified for Platforms gives eligible, high-volume platforms customised compliance controls that reduce capability disruptions and speed merchant onboarding.

What SaaS platforms are responsible for when they embed payments

When a SaaS platform embeds payments, it takes on operational responsibilities:

• Merchant onboarding and KYC verification: Collecting and verifying the business and banking information required to activate merchants for payments

• Fraud monitoring and risk management: Identifying and acting on suspicious transactions to protect both the platform and its merchants

• Disputes and chargebacks: Managing the dispute process, submitting evidence, and absorbing or passing through chargeback liability

• Payment-related customer support: Resolving failed payments, refund requests, and payout questions on behalf of merchants

• Funds flow and payout timing: Controlling how and when money moves from buyers to merchants, including any holds or reserves

• Compliance and card network rules: Staying current with local regulatory requirements and card network rules across every market the platform operates in

• Tax form generation and delivery: Producing and distributing 1099s or equivalent tax documentation for merchants

• Transaction reconciliation and reporting: Maintaining accurate financial records and making them accessible for merchants and internal finance teams

The scope of these responsibilities grows with transaction volume and geographic footprint.

How to monetise embedded payments

While every platform’s monetisation strategy will depend on its customer base, business model, and growth goals, embedded payments open up promising new revenue opportunities. Here are a few ways platforms can put them to work:

Transaction fees

Platforms can charge a small fee—either a percentage of the transaction amount or a flat fee—for each transaction made through the embedded payment system. This is a common monetising method with embedded payments since it doesn’t require any up-front costs for submerchants and their customers.

Subscription fees

Monthly or annual subscription fees for access to an embedded payment system can include additional features such as advanced analytics, fraud detection, and customer support. This model is a strong fit for platforms with large customer bases or more complex payment needs.

Premium features

Platforms can charge additional fees for functionality like recurring payments, invoicing, and support for multiple payment methods. The right premium features to offer will depend on your customers’ unique needs.

Interchange fees

Platforms can monetise embedded payments by charging interchange fees, a percentage of each transaction that varies based on card type, merchant type, and whether the card is present at the time of purchase.

Stripe supports an IC+ (Interchange++) pricing model, also referred to as network cost pass-through, where platforms pass actual network costs through to their connected accounts with Stripe’s fee added transparently on top. This gives platforms a clearer view of their margins on each transaction compared to blended-rate pricing, which can obscure the true cost structure. IC+ pricing is available to platforms that meet Stripe’s volume and eligibility requirements.

Data and analytics

Embedded payments give platforms access to valuable data on payment trends and customer behaviour. Platforms can use these insights internally to inform product development and marketing strategy, or offer them to merchants as a paid add-on, covering areas like purchasing patterns, fraud detection, and seasonality.

Pay with Stripe Balance

Platforms can also enable Pay with Stripe Balance, which lets connected accounts pay their platform subscription fees directly from their available Stripe balance. This helps reduce payment failures, eliminating the need for external payment methods for recurring fees, and streamlining the billing relationship between the platform and its users.

Common pricing models for SaaS embedded payments

Platforms can monetise embedded payments through several pricing mechanics: flat-rate pricing (a fixed percentage per transaction), interchange-plus (the interchange fee plus a fixed markup), tiered pricing (grouped transaction rates), or a subscription-plus-usage model (a recurring fee combined with per-transaction rates). Many platforms also layer in freemium models to lower adoption barriers and create a natural upsell path. The right approach, or combination of approaches, depends on your platform’s volume, merchant mix, and growth strategy.

Embedded payments as a platform monetisation strategy

For platforms, embedded payments are more than a feature—they’re a revenue strategy. By owning the payment experience, platforms unlock multiple monetisation levers simultaneously: transaction fees, premium feature tiers, data products, and more. The most successful platforms treat embedded payments not as a one-time implementation but as a dynamic part of their business model, continuously refining their approach as their merchant mix and transaction volume grow. With the right infrastructure in place, embedded payments can shift from a cost centre into one of the platform’s most durable revenue streams.

Stripe's embedded payments solution

With embedded payments, Stripe helps platforms grow with efficiency, cost savings, easy upstart integration, customisation, and scalability. Connect, Stripe’s core payments software, is an easy and flexible way for platforms to quickly enable their users in 40+ countries to accept payments within their platform and receive payouts in minutes. Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. During its largest four-day period ever in late 2025, Stripe processed 578 million transactions without interruption.

Stripe Connect enables platforms to benefit from embedded payments without the workload and liabilities of building everything in-house. Connect ensures platforms and their users automatically stay up-to-date as local payments verification requirements change, collecting bank information, and verifying IDs to meet KYC requirements.

Learn more about how Stripe can help differentiate your platform and accelerate revenue growth, or get in touch with our team to get started.