SaaS Payments 101: Roadmap for monetizing payments

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a dominant method of delivering applications for a broad range of business solutions from CRM (Salesforce) to service and support (Jira) to finance and accounting (QuickBooks).

Now, organizations are seeking SaaS applications that are aligned with the vertical market they participate in, seeking vendors with domain expertise and applications that seamlessly integrate with their existing business operations.

As a result, SMBs who are using a SaaS application to power business processes like billing, scheduling, and marketing are looking for a better way to handle payment processing that is also SaaS based, and this has spawned a new industry – embedded payment processing. This enables SaaS companies to offer payment processing while minimizing their risk and maximizing the monetization of their payment flow from their other application offerings.

This paper looks at the pros and cons of different payments monetization models, from outsourcing payments altogether to becoming a registered payment facilitator (PayFac), to employing an embedded payments partnership (PayFac as a service) to meet payment processing goals while minimizing risk and maximizing revenue, and how Worldpay from FIS provides all the tools necessary for a successful implementation.