KATI PEASE: I recently had a conversation with a head of payments, and they shared with me, “Do you know what my counterparts in sales and marketing think about payments? They don’t.” So often heads of payments are working in a silo, and increasing payments adoption is impossible if your entire company is not aligned on driving it. This is one of the key challenges I focus on driving growth with platforms and one of the key reasons that they struggle with adoption. Stripe works with over 16,000 platforms, and over 800 of them are in the partner program where me and my team work closely with them to drive growth. Platforms know that payments drive both revenue and retention. However, so many platforms struggle to get their customers to actually use it. Everything I’m going to share today comes from partnering with hundreds of platforms talking about how they drive growth and they think about driving payments adoption.

Two years ago, when a platform came to us, they often had a story around, “We’re thinking about adding payments. Should we? If so, when?” Today, the conversation looks completely different. “Of course, we’re doing payments. How do we get more of our customers to actually use it? And how do we put ourselves in the best position to win?” Think about that shift for a second. We’ve gone from, “Should I do payments?” to “Why would I not do payments?” And the reason’s pretty simple: payments is the foundation. It’s the most critical part of your customer’s business. It’s how they get paid.

You go from being a tool to being indispensable in their journey. Platforms that win know that payments is not a side bet; it’s the foundation. I’m going to share a couple of data points to help illustrate this. Platforms that embed payments see a 6% higher retention rate. When your customers rely on you to get paid, switching becomes a much harder decision. The second is revenue per customer. Payments customers bring an additional $4,200 of annual recurring revenue. These numbers speak not only to those focused on payments but also CEOs and investors. Payments in fintech have become the top two expansion areas for vertical SaaS platforms. It is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s table stakes. But here’s where it gets really interesting to me. Platforms are actually getting better at this. In the last year, we have seen a jump from 27% to 40% average payment adoption. If 40% is average, what should you be aiming for?

Top platforms see average adoption rates of 80% or higher. If 40% is average, and 80% is possible, what’s standing in the way? There’s three key patterns I see when working with platforms that stand in the way. The first is: the “good enough” trap. Your customers have an existing payment solution today. It’s clunky. It’s not integrated with your software, but it works, and they’re busy, and so they stay put. The second: misaligned incentives. Every investor index includes payments. However, across product, marketing, and sales, it’s an afterthought. Payments features aren’t included in the roadmap. It’s missing from marketing campaigns. And your sales team is compensated on software revenue.

When your company is not aligned to drive payments adoption, it shows up in how you talk about payments, which brings me to my last point: weak go-to-market. Your messaging is generic, filled with payment jargon they don’t understand. Payments seems like an add-on, rather than bundled into the core software. There’s no clear reason for them to switch, so they stay. The good news is all three of these problems are solvable. Most platforms start on a go- to-market approach. Pricing and packaging, smarter messaging, all of this is really important. The two items that get most look overlooked most often is building really strong market fit and being able to be aligned internally. They seem really obvious, but so many platforms don’t get it right.

When we think about solving the “good enough” trap, the most important thing is to build your payments product around your customer needs. Find the most uniquely painful workflow, and solve it 10 times better. Not incrementally better, dramatically better. Create the “Why would I not switch?” moment. Fullbay is a great example. They’ve built a payments product that is distinctly theirs. It is built on the promise of reduced administrative burden and getting paid faster. This clarity is a huge reason why 90% of their customers have migrated to their new payment solution. You’ll hear from their VP of Payments Phil in a couple of moments.

Secondly, is get aligned internally. This is often the most overlooked. There’s no amount of great features that will drive adoption and move the needle on payments attached. Platforms that are most successful have a strong payments leader with backing from the CEO and investors. They rally the company around a business case where the core platform is improved by payments, driving both revenue and retention. They take shared goals across product, marketing, and sales, and they tie compensation around payments, not just to a dedicated payments team. When your software sales team starts getting compensated on payments revenue, everything really starts clicking. So we’ve come to the moments where payments have gone from optional to essential, and the question is no longer if, but how. The best way to learn is from people who have done this before. I’m going to bring up my colleague, Jono Keedy, who’s going to go deeper with three leaders from platforms who have built scalable payments businesses.

JONO KEEDY: Hi, everyone. I’m Jono. I lead a team here at Stripe entirely dedicated to helping software platforms launch and scale payments. I’ve had the privilege of working with Kati and the partner ecosystem team for over six years now to help new platforms embed payments for the first time and existing customers to increase payments adoption, and truly become best in class. After working with hundreds of platforms, the most common misconception I hear is, “If I build it, they will come.” As Kati mentioned, launching and scaling payments requires a 360-degree view of the entire business. To help us deconstruct this playbook, I’m thrilled to welcome three industry leaders to the stage, each of whom has successfully figured out how to become the financial operating system for the customers they serve.

Please join me and welcome Phil from Fullbay, Catherine from GlossGenius, and Ben from Nextech. So, Ben, let’s start with you. You’ve been on the forefront of vertical SaaS at two vastly different companies: Clio, a platform that helps streamline the operations for law firms, and now Nextech, a platform that helps simplify the delivery of patient care. What did you learn about the different customer needs at each platform, and how did that play into your product strategy to drive payments adoption?

BEN BRIDEAUX: Yeah, certainly. So, it’s been a learning experience, to say the least. I think the starting point is always really trying to understand your customers. Now, obviously that seems incredibly basic and simple, but what I talk about here is really trying to define an archetype for your customers within your particular industry, and even within industries or verticals, you’re going to find a lot of variability within that respective domain. So, when we’re at Clio, the archetype that we ultimately had was a small to mid-size legal practice. And so what did we discover is the primary challenge point that we’re looking to solve for to really open up this opportunity with respect to payments and financial services, it was IOLTA trust compliance. The way in which a lawyer gets paid is they receive a retainer at the front, and ultimately that money goes into a trust account for all intents and purposes, but those funds aren’t the lawyers yet.

And if a lawyer was to misuse those funds, for instance, they can start to get into really troublesome areas very, very quickly, including but not limited to disbarment. So when we started to build Clio Payments, really the starting focus point was on trust and compliance. And if we could deliver an amazing practice management experience that focused and solved for that challenge, realistically, the payments workflow was then a no-brainer. We got an opportunity to unlock that payments conversation. Conversely, at Nextech, which again is practice management for healthcare, we have two very different archetypes of practices within that domain: we have both medical healthcare practices—think of that as ophthalmology or dermatology or orthopedics—and, in this instance, you’ve got the patient, the provider, but also insurance companies. And so when you’re in or working with a medical healthcare company, the time that it might take them to get paid could be up to 90 days.

So, cashflow and the collections rate are top of mind for them. And so we build Nextech Payments with those elements top of mind. Conversely, we work in plastics and also in med spa, which GlossGenius does as well. These are cash-pay businesses—they’re getting paid upfront or taking prepayments ahead of an appointment. And so, we had to engineer all of these different workflows to truly unlock the value for those practices in order to win the right to be their financial partner.

JONO KEEDY: And, Phil, you’ve had a little bit different of a background in vertical SaaS of going really deep in one industry, the automotive industry. Coming from Tekmetric and now at Fullbay, what did you learn about the repair shop owner, and how did that play into your product strategy and what you’ve built at Fullbay?

PHIL ACREE: Yeah, great question. As we sort of think about where shop owners come from, whether it’s in the automotive space or now at Fullbay with heavy duty, they usually start as a technician. And so when we think about how to communicate to them, and how to bring them across the line to get them engaged in payments, it’s a really different conversation. It often starts with a lot of education. In both places, we really focused on having real payment professionals on our team, people with deep knowledge of the payments industry, folks with background in that, that can really take that repair shop owner sort of through the journey of the value of payments. And so, as we’ve built out, as I’ve built out teams in both places, that was a real focus of ours to be able to do that. And also just sort of having some of that experience, bringing people with experience on really allows you to go more quickly. And so those are some of the things we focused on.

JONO KEEDY: And so starting, I mean with Fullbay, starting with like a technician that then kind of builds themselves up to a repair shop owner, GlossGenius set out to empower that med spa owner or the salon to bring their creativity to life. But one of the traps that Kati had mentioned was the “good enough” trap. And I think that you guys kind of ran into that early on, where there is this payments experience that works, but it is time-consuming and a little clunky. How did you go about finding out the workflows that you wanted to fix and truly add value to, that led to the payments adoption that GlossGenius has today?

CATHERINE BELEY: Yeah, I think there were three avenues that we looked at: the first one is the most important, which is listening to and talking to your customers. So really understanding where they’re at, what are their needs, what are their friction points, and meeting them there. So solving tangible problems for them and understanding where they’re at with their business. So for us, we have a lot of really small business owners. A lot of them are solopreneurs. They’re price-sensitive, they’re cost-sensitive, they’re very sensitive to their pay. They need those things immediately accessible to them. And so we decided that we were going to create a payments experience that really facilitated those things for them. They’re also growing their businesses. So how do we create a payments product that’s helping them do that? So it’s not just this transactional capability for them, but it’s helping them to fill their calendars, it’s helping them to acquire new clients, all of those sorts of things. So really understanding where are they at? How can we meet them there? How can we build something that’s tailored for them?

The second is: data. We collect a lot of data. I would say payments is probably one of the most important and critical pieces of data that we’re able to acquire. And we can use that not just for our payments product, but across the entire business and industry, and we’re doing that right now. But for us, there’s certain things that your customers are going to tell you that are like product gaps, things like that, but the data can tell you a different story as well, right? What are the friction points in checkout? Where are we not converting them? Where are they running into errors? Is hardware working well enough for them? Are we onboarding them effectively?

And then the third avenue that we focus on is like, where are we trying to go as a company? Where are we trying to grow? So we have a core base today. We’re trying to meet them and serve them in the best way that we can. We also have our sights set on going deeper and expanding. We’re trying to move up market, we’re trying to move horizontally. And so when we look at that, I think it’s really important to also look at the competitive landscape and talk to those customers that might fall outside of your base. So what are some of the capabilities we don’t have today that are going to be blockers for us to be able to acquire larger teams, for us to be able to move into like spas, med spas, pet salons, things like that, that we don’t currently have, that we need to facilitate in order to be able to provide a working payments product for them.

JONO KEEDY: And you kind of touched on this, that you guys are looking to go horizontal, up and down, to different company sizes, specifically working with SMBs and enterprises, as you guys are trying to go up the company side. How does that play into the product priorities of what you guys choose to focus on, what you choose to build, what you choose to ship?

CATHERINE BELEY: Yes, it is constant balance. There are things that we can build that are going to service our very large base that we have today. And so those are important to us because one, it’s catering to our core customer; we realize amazing growth and rewards from that immediately. But then, at the same time, from like a company priority perspective, as we’re trying to move up market and horizontally, there are blockers, and like we’re making investments to build out a sales team, and we’re doubling down on that, but they can’t sell if they don’t have a product that’s actually feasible for their target customer to use. So it’s really a juggling act, and we try to balance those things, and it’s working across the entire organization to understand like, are we blocking? Are there other things that are going, that are also blocking that we need to sequence against?

And then kind of like piecing those things together. But we’ve been able to do a lot of things and kind of find ways to… I’ll give a couple of examples, but BNPL was something that we launched last year, and we really did that because it was like critical for med spas and spas. They really wanted that. It was a blocker for them coming on the platform. But what we found is like salons might not be your most obvious use case for BNPL, but there are a lot of use cases. And if we educate our customers on that and make them aware of how they can incorporate this into their product portfolio, and offer it to their clients and do some marketing around that, they can see their AOVs triple. And so finding those sorts of synergies behind product things that we’re trying to do to move in new directions, but that also work for our existing base, I think has been really successful.

JONO KEEDY: Turning the hairstylist into a salesperson for GlossGenius. I love it. I think one of the through lines I heard just from all of you guys’ responses is that approaching payments to not just be a feature, but actually solving real world problems is like one of the key ingredients to really driving that adoption. Secondly, earlier, Kati had mentioned that the importance of making payments a company-wide priority. I’d be curious, just kind of open question to the group here, how did you drive that alignment with the executive team and the people that were kind of driving the strategy forward, and what incentives did you use?

PHIL ACREE: I can go first.

BEN BRIDEAUX: I can go first.

PHIL ACREE: Oh.

BEN BRIDEAUX: No, after you, Phil, please.

PHIL ACREE: Okay. Yeah. I’m fortunate to… I sit on our executive team, and I think whether or not that is something as a platform CEO or a founder that you may or may not be open to, I think sort of at minimum, if you have a small executive-level team, maybe the payments person doesn’t sit on that, but certainly your broader leadership executive team. And I think that’s really, really vital that that person is involved in board calls. There’s a level of expectation across the organization that payments is important. And so, for us, that to me, it sort of starts there. After that, we just make sure that we are communicating to all of our teams. I think Kati talked earlier about using incentives for that and compensation. And so we SPIFF our folks, even though we have a specialized payments team, and I do think that’s really important.

Our AEs, our software AEs, are incentivized to bring up payments and to talk about payments in their demos. Our onboarders are incentivized to do that. Our CSMs on the software side are incentivized to do that. So there’s really nowhere that a customer doesn’t, that there is some sort of customer interaction that whoever that person on our team is interacting with them, that they’re not incentivized some way to make sure that we’re really encouraging payments and getting people to adopt it.

BEN BRIDEAUX: Yeah, we’re in a similar boat. So again, our, very fortunate coming into Nextech, where our financial sponsor actually had payments as a part of the core thesis. So, it’s been very easy to do my job in so far as the ELT is aligned that this is a priority. But I think what Phil just touched on is incredibly important to double-click into, which is it’s our responsibility to then translate that throughout the entire organization. And the way in which that shows up for a salesperson versus an implementation person versus a CSM or support person, I think actually is fundamentally different, and that’s where the rubber meets the road. So, what we’ve done at Nextech, for instance, is every single salesperson actually has a payments quota as a part of their compensation structure. Our CSMs are engaged in an expansion motion where we’re looking to get additional utilization of new payment methods that we’ve just launched, and we’re using a SPIFF structure there, but essentially there’s the age-old adage of, “Show me an incentive, I’ll show you an outcome.”

I think that is incredibly true for your ancillary products or not core SaaS products, and payments can be an incredible beneficiary of that. But I think that what is fundamentally different with a payments business today is that oftentimes like the hiring profile for an individual in those respective teams might be from industry, or they might be software people. What I’ve found consistent across all my experiences is that payments oftentimes is a bit of a different language, and you really have to bring the organization along for that journey and educate them on what is payments, why is it valuable, and how does it show up for that respective person, whether it’s helping them sell more software, helping them retain more customers during a client escalation, or just actually helping that practice be more successful utilizing your entire product suite.

CATHERINE BELEY: The only thing I would add to that, because we do very similar things at GlossGenius, is I think starting with the why is really important, and it helps to get buy-in across the board, right? So, bringing that to the executive team and getting alignment that, hey, if we double down in payments, like one, this is already one of the biggest… At GlossGenius, it’s the biggest revenue driver for the company, so it should be a priority. And two, if we do X, Y, and Z, here’s how much more we can grow. Here’s how that translates into tangible goals, not just like GPV things that I’m responsible for, but ARR for the entire company. And so when you have that buy-in, and people see those numbers, and they understand, while there’s so much goodness to happen here, it gets really… I have found it gets a lot easier for cross-functional teams and the entire organization to move in that direction.

And so, beyond just sales, right? For us, we have a lot of self-serve activations and things like that. We need buy-in from our growth team. We’re launching a huge AI strategy right now. We want payments to be a part of that AI strategy and all the great products that we build for payments to be incorporated in that. And when I think all of the cross-functional teams recognize, realize, and are goaled on payments beyond just getting new users in and attached to payments, it becomes a lot easier for us to be able to get the momentum and actually move forward with those things.

JONO KEEDY: I love it. The Phil model of: get the promotion to have a seat at the table with the executive team, and making sure that the sellers are well compensated for driving the payments adoption, the revenue that is coming from payments, to really shift that mix from being traditional SaaS revenue into growing the payments revenue, which is awesome.

BEN BRIDEAUX: Just to double-click into that, because, again, I agree with everything Cat said. It’s I think very easy to talk about payments revenue in isolation. What I think is a real opportunity for a lot of payments leaders, as well, is to talk about, again, that second order effect on other types of revenue within your business. If you can increase your retention rate, increase your net dollar, your net dollar retention, et cetera, that’s where you start to see these compounding effects. And oftentimes that’s a little bit more difficult to measure. It’s both quantitative and qualitative, but again, payments is this amazing foundation for platforms that helps them in so many different ways where if you can execute on that, again, it becomes very valuable for your business.

JONO KEEDY: We talk a lot about… Stripe does a lot, and we have a lot of products, and with platforms, in particular, we talk a lot about increasing the LTV of the customers that you guys serve. And so while, yes, that it’s increasing the payments revenue, while, yes, issuing drives revenue and value there, but there is this second order effect that it is increasing the stickiness that you guys have, or the customers have, to your platform to ensure that they’re not churning, and elongates the SaaS revenue and the payments revenue that they’re earning for your guys’ business. It’s great. Cat, you briefly mentioned this, but I’d love to open this up for the group. Vertical SaaS is kind of being heavily impacted by AI. We’ve heard a lot about it this week, and I’d be curious how each of you see AI being incorporated into your business, to make sure that the software that you provide is becoming indispensable for the customers you serve, and how you found that you’re differentiating from other competitors in the market.

CATHERINE BELEY: Yeah. So I mentioned this, but at GlossGenius, for 2026, AI is like number one and two priority for us across the entire company, and we’re tackling it both internally and externally. And so I’ll touch on that just really quickly. I would say externally, that’s probably the sexiest thing, which is like, how can we integrate AI into our native product and bring AI capabilities that these businesses otherwise wouldn’t have access to? They wouldn’t probably go out on their own and get a Claude subscription and build an AI receptionist or an AI growth analyst. Well, we can do that for them. And so we’re really doubling down on that, and we see an immense amount of opportunity there. While we’re not building an “AI payments” capability right now, maybe that’s to come. Payments data, I mentioned this before, is so cornerstone to everything that we’re doing for our AI strategy at GlossGenius.

So, it’s powering a lot of the recommendations that we’re trying to give to businesses in terms of how do they grow. It’s going to be servicing our front desk. It’s helping with how are we doing booking and rebooking. And when we look at marketing, how are we going to be able to help our businesses upsell into different products and different payment methods like BNPL, that grows their AOV? So the payments data is just absolutely fundamental to our AI strategy, and we’ve been leaning in really heavily there. Then, on the other side, how are we doing it internally? There’s so many use cases. I’m sure all of you are learning this as you’re going on this journey yourselves and your own companies. It’s accelerating what we can do. It’s been just crazy to see how quickly and how much more we can parallelize, how much faster things are going in terms of development, particularly on the product side, on the marketing side. And then we’ve been able to try some really cool things.

This is an example I love to say, but our businesses, they’re not smart on pricing. They set up their shop. They might look at five businesses that are in the near vicinity and say like, “Okay, a haircut costs $65,” right? Well, we have hundreds of thousands of businesses. We have all of that pricing data. I sat down one night and was like, “Hey, what if we created a pricing engine for our businesses where they could type in their zip code?” We match cost of living data to that. We basically create these hierarchies, and we can give them recommendations like, “Here’s the min, here’s the median, here’s the average, here’s the max. Where do you fall within here? Here’s what we recommend based on your business.” And that’s super powerful for our businesses. That’s like intelligence they would never have. They wouldn’t be able to collect on their own. So, really cool use cases, very excited about it.

JONO KEEDY: It’s amazing. Ben, Phil?

PHIL ACREE: Yeah, for us, I’ll be real specific with a couple things. I don’t know about you all, but we certainly have some problems to fix in our company. You guys probably have it all lined up, but we definitely got some things to figure out. And one of those is we’re going through a Salesforce migration, and we’ve sort of got data in a lot of different places. And so I’ve been able to utilize and bring those pieces of data together, and utilize Claude to help build a real payments dashboard. One of the things that I’m specifically focusing on is velocity. Because of the nature of our business—heavy duty repair—it’s low transaction volume, high value, which means we can have pretty healthy customers that may only do a handful of transactions a month. And so, for us, it’s really hard to sort of identify a healthy customer because of that.

And so we’re using Claude, bringing all of that data together. We’ve got it connected directly into Stripe so that we can get real-time data, which we don’t have in our Salesforce instance. We’re going to get there, but today we don’t, and I don’t want to wait. And so, those are some of the things that we’re doing sort of practically for us. We’re also using our scorecards. So this is all sort of internal stuff, but our ZRA scorecards and not just for our payments team, but for our teams across the board. So things that we sort of want them to be saying, or things we don’t want them to be saying, so that we can make sure that we’re doing effective coaching specifically around the payments conversation.

JONO KEEDY: I’m sure everyone’s Salesforce data is perfectly clean, for the audience. So Ben, round us out.

BEN BRIDEAUX: Yeah, certainly. So, we have, pretty much every single person at Nextech has some percentage of their day or capacity carved out to focus on AI applications. So, to give a couple examples of that, we absolutely have new products that we’ll be bringing to market or have brought to market to improve the practice of medicine. An example of that would be we have a AI scribe product that can take a clinical encounter and then do direct chart injection. It gives time back to the provider, to the scribes, et cetera, and it’s just like a really amazing product, and it’s only going to get better over time. What I am getting—and maybe this is less of a keynote appropriate sort of topic—but the thing that I’m most excited about now is what I’d refer to as invisible AI. And this is the unsexy stuff, back office that actually can drive a tremendous amount of value to our practices.

So I think the pricing example is a really interesting one. You can help a practice actually optimize what they should be charging for a particular product and service, and that can be highly revenue accretive to them. But I think there are so many other applications within the payments landscape where that shows up. So another example would be, can we use AI intelligence to do additional sort of data crunching to understand what is the best time to send a text message in order to get, to improve your collection rate on an outstanding patient financial responsibility? What are the areas of opportunity during a clinical consultation that you could present patient financing to help increase the probability that a patient moves forward with what that service is? We have a tremendous amount of data in these practice management and payments applications, but what AI is now unlocking is for the ability for any person in the organization to bring their own creativity and ideas to this data, and then ultimately look to unlock that as a new point of value for our practices.

JONO KEEDY: I love hearing the differences in applications in AI, but it kind of centers around just solving real customer problems. I think that’s one thing that I take away from today, that we started with, is find out the pain points of your customers and actually add value and solve those workflows. Two: ensuring that payments is a company-wide priority. And three: just be on the forefront of AI and trying new things to fix those problems. So Phil, Catherine, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom. We really appreciate it.