Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- The global embedded payment market was valued at roughly $39.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 35.5% CAGR through 2033 (Grand View Research, 2025).
- SaaS providers offering integrated payments already account for 36% of SME acquiring revenue, a share expected to reach 45% by 2028 (GM Insights, 2025).
- Only about 32.4% of organizations maintain full PCI DSS compliance year over year, and non-compliance fines can reach $100,000 per month past the six-month mark (Sprinto, 2025).
- A payment gateway is a small piece of a much larger integration decision: security certification, onboarding speed, supported payment types, and revenue-share terms all matter more than any single feature.
Why Payment Integration Decisions Carry More Weight in SaaS
Payment integration now functions as a core product decision for SaaS platforms, not a back-office afterthought, because customers expect to pay, get paid, or move money without ever leaving the product. Most SaaS platforms didn’t set out to become payment companies; they set out to solve a workflow problem, and that expectation followed.
The scale of that shift is easy to underestimate. The global embedded payment market was estimated at roughly $39.14 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 35.5% compound annual rate through 2033 (Grand View Research, 2025). SaaS and software vendors aren’t a side note in that growth; integrated-payments revenue already makes up 36% of SME acquiring revenue and is expected to climb to 45% by 2028 (GM Insights, 2025). Whatever vertical a platform serves, its users increasingly expect payment to be a native feature, not a redirect to a third-party checkout page.
What Changed Since SaaS Went Mainstream
The shift to continuously updated cloud delivery means payment updates, security patches, and new payment methods can now roll out without anyone touching a client’s environment, unlike the old model of a customer buying a license once and living with whatever bugs shipped that year. That matters more in payments than in almost any other category of software, because a coding error here doesn’t just mean a bad user experience, it can mean a compliance failure.
What to Evaluate Before Choosing a Payment Integration
Feature lists are the easy part to compare. The harder, more consequential questions are usually about risk, support, and how much engineering time the integration will actually consume.
Security and Compliance Depth
PCI DSS compliance isn’t optional, and it isn’t cheap to get wrong. Fewer than a third of organizations maintain full compliance year over year, and penalties escalate the longer a gap goes unresolved, from $5,000-$10,000 per month in the first quarter of non-compliance up to $100,000 per month after six months (Sprinto, 2025). Any payment partner should be able to state plainly what level of PCI compliance it holds and what tokenization or vaulting options exist to keep raw card data out of your systems entirely.
Developer Experience and Integration Speed
How a platform’s API is documented and structured has a direct effect on how fast a team ships. Organizations that adopt an API-first approach report cutting setup time by roughly 66% and lowering three-year development costs by about 38% compared with more fragmented integration approaches (ResolvePay, 2025). Ask for real API documentation, a sandbox environment, and a support contact before signing anything, not just a sales deck.
Coverage Across Channels and Currencies
A platform serving customers across card-present retail, e-commerce, and mail order/telephone order (MO/TO) needs a gateway that supports all three without forcing separate integrations for each. The same logic applies to currency support: cross-border sales require multi-currency processing, not a workaround bolted on after the fact.
Revenue Model and Support Structure
Many payment integrations now let the software platform participate in payment revenue rather than treating processing purely as a pass-through cost. That only matters if the onboarding, reporting, and customer support behind it are solid, since a revenue share is worth little if your team ends up fielding your customers’ payment support tickets anyway.
Where a Payments Partner Fits In
Cartis Payments works with ISVs and SaaS platforms as a payment processing provider, connecting them to Elavon’s merchant services and gateway infrastructure through a single API that covers card-present and card-not-present transactions across North America, along with fraud protection and chargeback management. That’s the kind of specialist layer worth evaluating alongside developer-friendly APIs, PCI-compliant infrastructure, and support for the full range of payment methods your customers expect, rather than treating any single vendor’s feature list as the whole decision.
Best Practices for Evaluating a Payment Integration
- Confirm the provider’s PCI compliance level in writing, along with what tokenization and card-vaulting options are available.
- Request real API documentation and a sandbox before committing engineering time to a proof of concept.
- Check that card-present, e-commerce, and MO/TO transactions all run through the same integration rather than three separate ones.
- Ask whether fraud protection and chargeback management run through the same API as processing, or as a bolt-on with separate reporting.
- Clarify support ownership upfront: who fields your customers’ payment questions once the integration is live.
FAQ
Why are more SaaS platforms embedding payments directly into their product?
Customers increasingly expect to pay or get paid without leaving the platform. Integrated payments already represent 36% of SME acquiring revenue for software providers, a share projected to reach 45% by 2028 (GM Insights, 2025).
What’s the biggest compliance risk in a payment integration?
PCI DSS non-compliance. Fewer than a third of organizations stay fully compliant year over year, and penalties can climb to $100,000 per month for prolonged gaps, so confirming a provider’s PCI level upfront matters more than most feature comparisons.
Does an API-first payment provider actually save development time?
Reported results vary by project, but organizations using API-first payment platforms have cited roughly 66% faster setup and lower multi-year development costs compared with fragmented integration approaches.
What should a SaaS platform ask a payments partner before integrating?
Ask for documented PCI compliance level, sandbox access, whether card-present, e-commerce, and MO/TO transactions share one integration, and whether fraud protection and chargeback management run through the same API as processing. Contact Cartis to talk through a SaaS payment integration.
