If you’re exploring integrated payments for your SaaS platform, you’re likely thinking about more than just how to accept transactions. You want payments to feel like a natural extension of your product, to support your growth rather than limit it, and to create a meaningful revenue stream without turning your team into payments specialists.

If payments still sit outside your platform, you may already be running into a few familiar problems:

• Payments feel like a separate system, not part of your product. Checkout, onboarding, and support live in another tool, which means merchants move between platforms, and your team ends up fielding issues you do not fully control.
• Pricing and margins are out of your control. It’s not always clear where your revenue comes from, how much room you have to adjust pricing, or how to design a model that grows without making you less competitive.

Integrated payments with the right partner can help to alleviate these problems.

This guide will walk you through how integrated payments work in practice, what to look for when comparing providers, and how Fiska helps software companies turn payments into a scalable part of their business.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• How do integrated payments work for SaaS platforms?
• Four benefits of embedding payments
• How to choose the right integrated payments provider
• How Fiska helps software companies embed and monetize payments

Ready to start earning revenue from payments? Book a call with our SaaS experts to learn how we can help.

How do integrated payments work for SaaS platforms?

Integrated payments enable you to embed payment acceptance directly into your software so your merchants can get paid without the end user leaving your platform. Instead of sending users to a separate payment provider, payments become a native part of your software experience.

Here is what the process typically looks like:

• You partner with an integrated payments provider and integrate the provider’s APIs into your platform, which connects your software to the payment network.
• Your merchants’ customers enter their payment details inside your platform’s checkout or UI, without being redirected to a third-party site.
• The provider then routes the tokenized transaction through the payment processor, which communicates with the customer’s bank for authorization.

For example, imagine you’re a SaaS platform built for fitness studios. If you offer integrated payments, the end user can register and pay for a class online through the same platform. This gives your merchants a frictionless customer experience.

Your integrated payments partner typically handles risk and compliance, such as PCI compliance, chargebacks, and fraud monitoring.

Four benefits of embedding payments

1. Create a new, scalable revenue stream

Integrated payments open a more scalable revenue stream. Instead of charging more for your software, you earn a share of the payment volume flowing through your platform. As your merchants grow, your revenue grows with them.

Once the core payments infrastructure is in place, scaling this model is relatively low-friction. Adding new merchants or supporting higher transaction volumes requires minimal effort.

Over time, this can improve margins, as payment revenue tends to scale faster than the ongoing costs of maintaining the underlying payments stack.

If increasing revenue is the wider goal, explore alternative revenue models for software platforms, from usage-based pricing to premium services and embedded finance.

2. Increase your platform’s value and reduce customer churn

Embedding payments makes your software an integral tool in your customers’ daily operations and deepens their reliance on your platform. The more parts of the merchant’s business that utilize your software, the more valuable it becomes to them.

When everything from sales and refunds to payouts and reports happens within your platform, merchants are less likely to leave. Removing the need for third-party payment tools makes your platform more convenient and valuable to the businesses that run on it.

For example, a mobile mechanic might use one platform for scheduling and storing vehicle details and a separate tool for processing payments and sending receipts.

Without embedded payments, the mechanic is forced to juggle multiple systems, which can be frustrating, inefficient, and hard to scale as the business grows. But if your platform can bring everything together, you become the most convenient option for the mechanic.

3. Own the customer journey and build merchant trust

Perhaps you’ve spent a considerable amount of energy and money developing a frictionless software platform, yet the payment experience is disconnected and jarring.

Integrating payments enables you to customize your onboarding flow so it’s smoother and significantly reduces friction. The extent to which you can customize onboarding depends on the payment provider you choose, but ideally, you should be able to tailor flows based on the merchant type or location and control onboarding steps, their order, and conditional logic so merchants only see what is relevant.

If the provider allows for white labeling, you can use your branding throughout onboarding and payments instead of another brand’s logo appearing at checkout, so that the process feels more cohesive.

4. Drive adoption with omnichannel payments

You can increase your platform’s value further and attract new merchants if you choose a provider that offers a true omnichannel solution. Omnichannel support for online, in-person, and mobile payments makes payments more useful to customers. It also lets you win new verticals, such as hospitality and retail, which rely on both in-person and online sales. Not supporting omnichannel payments means you’re cutting out a lot of the market.

Many payment providers are multi-channel, not omnichannel. So you can start with online payments and add in-person payments at a later date, but doing so will require a new integration, which can be a pain to set up and manage. On the other hand, with a true omnichannel provider, you have this capability from day one, and if you decide to start offering in-person payments, you don’t need to do another integration.

Discover how Fiska enables you to deliver a true omnichannel payments experience.

How to choose the right integrated payments provider

When deciding which integrated payments provider is right for your business, consider the following:

How easy is it to integrate with the solution?

Integration ease is an important consideration because it directly affects:

• Speed: A solution that’s easy to integrate with will enable you to launch faster, and the sooner you can launch payments, the sooner you can start monetizing transactions.
• Cost: Well-designed APIs that are easy to integrate with and update reduce engineering effort and ongoing maintenance, which saves you money.
• Reliability: Difficult integrations can increase the risk of bugs and payment failures.
• Scalability: Flexible APIs make it easier to scale without re-engineering your payments stack, which means you can expand into new markets, handle higher volumes, and add new business models like subscriptions more easily.

What type of support does it offer?

As a software company, you probably don’t have in-house staff with expert payments knowledge. This makes choosing a provider that offers great support critical because without proper guidance and support from payments experts, it’s easier to underprice, overlook compliance requirements, or leave revenue on the table.

The ideal provider has a support team that’s easy to reach quickly through your preferred method, such as phone call, email, or Slack, to minimize your downtime and stress. The level of support is also important to consider. It’s worth finding a provider who will interact directly with your merchants if necessary: for instance, if they experience a payment issue that you’re not able to solve without our guidance.

What is the pricing model, and are there fees?

Most integrated payments providers offer different pricing models, but revenue share is often the easiest way for SaaS platforms to turn payments into a real growth driver.

Instead of adding a fixed fee to every transaction, you earn a share of the payment volume that flows through your platform. As your merchants process more payments, your revenue increases with them – without needing to raise your software prices or renegotiate contracts.

Look for a provider that is transparent about its costs so you can understand how much margin you’re keeping and price your offering competitively.

It’s also worth avoiding providers that lock you into long-term commitments or minimum volumes, as this can limit your flexibility as your business and go-to-market strategy evolve.

Finally, choose a provider that lets you set pricing by merchant. This gives you the option to bundle payments into your plans, offer them as a premium feature, or tailor pricing for different customer segments.

Does it offer white labelling?

Third-party branding can make payments feel disconnected from your platform. A white-labelled solution keeps the experience consistent, allowing payments to appear as a native feature of your software.

With a provider that offers white labelling, your branding remains consistent across onboarding flows, dashboards, invoices, and communications, helping reinforce trust and positioning your platform as the single system your customers rely on to run their business.

Is it truly omnichannel?

Most of your merchants probably accept payments through multiple channels, such as on their website, in their store, or through a mobile app. And without omnichannel payments, you have to manage multiple integrations to support these channels, which creates more work for your development team.

A truly omnichannel payments provider supports multiple payment methods and channels through a single, unified platform. Transactions, reporting, refunds, and customer data are all managed in one place, providing a single view of the customer, simplifying reconciliation and fraud monitoring, and ensuring a consistent experience across all channels.

How Fiska helps software companies embed and monetize payments

As a SaaS company, payments often become the bottleneck to your next stage of growth.

The tools that make it easy to get started can become expensive and rigid as your transaction volume increases. Legacy providers offer more control, but at the cost of outdated technology, complex integrations, and slow partner support. And building payments in-house usually means hiring specialists, navigating regulations, and taking focus away from your core product.

That tension is what led us to start Fiska.

Most of our team comes from the software world. We saw firsthand how, over the last decade, software and payments stopped being separate systems and started becoming part of the same product experience. Merchants no longer wanted a “payments provider.” They wanted their software to handle everything.

So we built Fiska to make payments an enabler, not an obstacle.

A way for ISVs to open a new revenue stream, control the merchant onboarding experience, tailor pricing by customer or region, and support both online and in-person payments: without becoming payments experts themselves.

Today, we work exclusively with SaaS platforms. That focus shapes everything we build, from our APIs to our support model.

Here are three reasons software companies choose to work with us:

1. Optimize your payment strategy with a true revenue share model and flexible monetization

When SaaS platforms start with a flat-rate provider like Stripe, the pricing is simple: a fixed fee on every transaction. That simplicity helps you move fast early on, but as volume grows, it also caps how much value you can keep from the payments flowing through your platform.

At that point, your only real lever is to add a markup on top of the standard rate. For many merchants, that quickly makes your platform feel more expensive, even if your software itself is competitive.

At Fiska, our cost basis is interchange, and we operate on a true revenue share. Instead of working from a fixed public rate, you set the price your merchants see. We split the margin that sits above interchange, so when your merchants grow, your revenue grows with them.

In practice, that means you can keep familiar pricing for your merchants, for example, the standard 2.9% + $0.30 that many are familiar with, while still participating in the value created above the underlying network costs.

We only make money when you do, and we never charge platform fees. We don’t lock you into a single pricing structure: you stay in control of your pricing.

2. Strengthen your brand and user experience with white-label payments

When payments are powered by someone else’s brand, it shows. The checkout looks different, the language changes, and for merchants and their customers, the experience can start to feel like they’ve stepped out of your product and into another company’s system.

Over time, that weakens trust in your brand. Instead of being the platform that runs the business, you start to look like a layer sitting on top of someone else’s payment stack.

With full white-label support, everything from onboarding to checkout and receipts can carry your logo, design, and language. Fiska stays in the background, powering the infrastructure, while your platform stays front and center.

For your merchants and their customers, it feels like a single, cohesive product, rather than software bolted onto a third-party payments flow.

Support is also a critical part of the user experience. Whether you need help troubleshooting an issue or your merchant has a question you’re not able to answer on your own, we’ll step in quickly to help. Even in cases where we’re providing assistance for one of your merchants, our white-label support experience means everything remains under your brand.

3. Scale quickly and compliantly with a single, omnichannel API and support from payments experts

With a single API, you can support online, in-person, and mobile payments without rebuilding your workflows each time you expand. The core integration stays the same, even as your product and your merchants move into new channels and use cases.

We handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes. We’re pre-certified and pre-integrated with major networks and terminals, so adding in-person payments or new payment methods doesn’t mean standing up new infrastructure.

After launch, we take care of maintenance, updates, settlements, and compliance. You get a single place to see transactions, manage payouts, and track revenue, while your team stays focused on building your product, not running a payments operation.

From KYC and PCI to card network rules and risk management, the regulatory work stays with us.

Create new revenue opportunities and strengthen merchant relationships with integrated payments

Integrated payments drive revenue growth, customer retention, and product differentiation. Fiska enables you to reap these benefits without adding operational or regulatory complexity.

Our revenue share model makes it easy to earn revenue from payments, and you don’t have to become a payments expert because we offer technical support, strategy, and handle compliance and regulations. Additionally, integration into our omnichannel API is easy, so you can go live sooner (think weeks versus months).

Ready to get set up with integrated payments? Book a no-obligation call with our founder to learn how we can help.

FAQ: ISV integrated payments

How do ISVs make money from integrated payments?

ISVs can earn additional revenue from integrated payment solutions in a few main ways. The most common is adding a markup to payment processing fees that flow through a payment gateway.

Another approach is a revenue share with a payment facilitator (PayFac) or integrated payments provider, where you receive a portion of the fees generated by card payments and other payment options. Some platforms also charge for premium payment functionality, such as faster payouts, advanced reporting, or real-time transaction visibility.

Do integrated payment systems improve retention and user experience?

Yes. Embedding payment functionality directly into your software creates a more seamless user experience. When checkout, point-of-sale, refunds, and reporting all live in one payment system, merchants rely more heavily on your platform and are less likely to switch, which helps build a long-term competitive edge.

What should ISVs look for in an integrated payments partner?

Look for a provider that offers easy payment integration, strong PCI DSS support and fraud prevention, flexible pricing, and the ability to scale into global payments. The right partner should support both your team and your merchants as your platform grows.

What’s the difference between a PayFac and other integrated payment models?

A payment facilitator (PayFac) model lets a platform onboard merchants under a master account, while the merchants remain the legal sellers. In a Merchant of Record (MoR) model, the platform becomes the legal seller and typically handles taxes, refunds, and consumer compliance.