How do you get lawyers and law firms to adopt the latest technologies in payments?

Traditionally, the field would probably classify itself as slow on adoption of technology. But AI is really changing that. Our CEO and founder, Jack Newton, has talked about the death of the billable hour. Lawyers are used to being paid for time worked, but what we’re seeing on the back of AI and other innovations is new interest in charging for outcomes.

In that world, you can certainly imagine a hypothetical where you move away from a billable hour into a fixed fee. And in that case, finding efficiencies in your business means finding profitability in your business. Because if you spend less time on those things, and can work faster—same quality but faster—you can extend legal services to a bigger population, which has always been a part of Clio’s mission.

What advice do you have for platforms like yours that process payments as a service?

Payments revenue is a pretty simple formula: it’s your take rate times your volume. It’s really easy to get infatuated with the take rate, because it’s simple to understand and it feels more controllable than trying to get more customers, or helping those customers grow. But the reality is, those are the problems you need to solve. The take rate is the one thing that doesn’t compound.

You need to have more customers and ride those customers’ growth, whether it’s their business is doing better, or it’s just inflation, or whatever it may be. There’s natural, organic growth there. If you can then accelerate that growth, then that compounds out into the future: every month, you’re starting in a better position than the month before.

And the more volume you have, the more control you have over setting that take rate anyway, right? If you’re a really big processor, you can command a really good price from your processing partners. So if you keep the main thing the main thing—which is to serve your customers better so you have more of them using your product more often—then the revenue will come.

How can businesses make their payment experience a differentiator?

The best payment experiences are the ones that are transparent: they disappear into the background. We’re obviously acutely sensitive to when these things go wrong. I say this a lot to companies that are starting to embark on a payments journey: if you think your tolerance for bugs in software is low, you can’t imagine what it’s like for people’s money.

Where you can get into differentiation, where you have these “wow” moments, is when you can take processes that are usually painful and make them surprisingly easy. But the key to staying differentiated is focusing on what you can deliver, rather than getting excited about any one feature—because eventually, everyone catches up, and those things that used to be “wow” factors become table stakes.

So can you make getting paid easier? Can you drive better financial outcomes? Can you let your customers focus on what makes them special, on delivering their service? For us, that’s a lawyer helping someone with their will or trust or estate or a lawsuit or whatever it may be. During my time at Mindbody, that was helping a practitioner get back to teaching yoga instead of trying to be the CFO of their small business. We want to empower people to do their best, highest-value work all the time.

How should businesses weigh the decision to use an integrated, all-in-one solution for payments, billing, fraud, etc., versus best-of-breed point solutions?

I think the value prop around vertical SaaS has always been that it’s contextually specific to the user. This extends to the way you handle financial transactions: you need to be able to tailor the experience so that it matches industry-specific expectations.

In terms of how to achieve that, if I were going to use a general rule, I would say smaller businesses, like the micro SMBs, want financial tools in one place. And they want it to be as integrated as possible. As companies move up in size and scale, they can afford more specialization, and that specialization may lend itself towards having multiple point solutions.

But a good payment platform can marry these approaches: I think there are always opportunities to deliver integrated services that are vertically specific.

More insights from our Payments Unscripted series

For more insights from leaders at companies such as FreshBooks, Anthropic, Visa, and Klarna, read our guide, Revenue growth reimagined: Practical lessons from 10 industry leaders.