Reviewed by Mayer Hyman, Payments Specialist | Reviewed for accuracy July 2026
Key Takeaways
- Cash usage has fallen to 46% of global payments, down from 50% in 2023, as digital payment methods keep displacing it (McKinsey Global Payments Report, 2025).
- Among vertical SaaS companies expanding into fintech, 87% now offer payments alongside their core software, up from just 30% a year earlier (Stripe Vertical SaaS Benchmark, 2025).
- Toast, a restaurant software platform, reported $4.05 billion in payments-related revenue in 2024 against $706 million in subscription revenue, more than five times as much (Toast Inc. Form 10-K, SEC, 2024).
- When payments become a platform’s primary revenue driver, the compliance, dispute handling, and funds-flow requirements behind that revenue become core product infrastructure, not an add-on.
Why Payments Now Outgrow the Software Wrapped Around Them
For years, payment processing was a convenience feature bolted onto a software product: a “pay now” button tucked into an invoicing tool or a booking platform. That framing no longer matches how the money actually moves. Cash usage has dropped to 46% of global payments, down from 50% in 2023, as digital rails keep absorbing the volume that used to move offline (McKinsey Global Payments Report, 2025). Every point of that shift lands somewhere, and increasingly it lands inside the software platforms merchants already use to run their business.
Toast is a clean illustration of how far that shift has gone. In 2024, the restaurant technology company reported $4.05 billion in financial technology (payments) revenue against $706 million in subscription revenue, meaning payments generated more than five times what the software subscriptions did (Toast Inc. Form 10-K, SEC, 2024). The subscription still anchors the customer relationship, but the payments layer is what actually carries the business.
The Adoption Curve Is Accelerating, Not Plateauing
This isn’t a slow drift. Among vertical SaaS companies that added fintech capabilities, 87% now offer payments as part of that expansion, up from 30% just a year prior, and the median payments attach rate across these platforms has doubled in twelve months (Stripe Vertical SaaS Benchmark, 2025). Platforms that once treated payments as optional are now building it in by default, because the take rate on transaction volume routinely outperforms the subscription fee sitting next to it.
What Changes Once Payments Becomes Core, Not Peripheral
The moment a software platform starts moving meaningful transaction volume, a different set of obligations shows up that a dashboard or CRM never had to handle: merchant underwriting, payout timing, dispute and chargeback workflows, and the compliance overhead that comes with touching card and bank data. None of these are edge cases anymore. They’re baseline requirements for any platform where payments are a real revenue line rather than a checkout formality.
The mismatch shows up when the business side moves faster than the technical side. Leadership recognizes payments as a growth lever first; the product and engineering teams building the actual money-movement plumbing tend to catch up later, and that lag is where a lot of platforms get stuck. A support queue full of unresolved chargebacks or a payout that lands a day late doesn’t just create friction, it creates churn risk for the merchants relying on that platform to get paid.
Underwriting and Fraud Exposure Scale With Transaction Volume
As transaction volume climbs, so does exposure to fraud and disputed charges, and both require infrastructure that most software teams weren’t originally built to maintain. Merchant underwriting has to happen fast enough not to slow onboarding, but thoroughly enough to avoid inheriting risk from a bad actor. Fraud screening has to run in real time without adding friction to a legitimate transaction. These aren’t features a platform can defer until “later,” because the exposure accrues from the first dollar processed.
Building (or Buying) the Infrastructure Behind the Payments Line
Platforms facing this shift generally choose between building payments infrastructure internally or integrating with a partner that already operates it at scale. Building in-house means owning underwriting, compliance, fraud monitoring, and chargeback resolution indefinitely, on top of whatever the platform’s core product already demands. Integrating with an established payments partner shifts that operational load without requiring the platform to become a payments company itself.
This is the layer where a processor like Cartis Payments typically enters the picture for software companies and ISVs that need payment processing, fraud protection, and chargeback management running through a single integration rather than several disconnected vendors. The goal isn’t to replace the platform’s core product, it’s to keep the money-movement infrastructure behind it from becoming the next engineering fire drill.
Questions to Ask Before Scaling a Payments Line
- Does your current setup handle merchant underwriting fast enough to avoid slowing onboarding, without skipping risk review?
- Who owns dispute and chargeback resolution today, and does that team have bandwidth as transaction volume grows?
- Is fraud screening running in real time, or is it a batch process that catches problems after funds have already moved?
- If payments revenue doubled next year, would your current infrastructure hold up, or would it need a rebuild?
FAQ
Why are software platforms making more money from payments than subscriptions?
Payments generate revenue on every transaction that flows through the platform, while subscriptions are typically a flat recurring fee. As transaction volume grows, the payments revenue line scales with it in a way subscription pricing doesn’t, which is why platforms like Toast report payments revenue several times larger than subscription revenue.
What infrastructure does a platform need once it starts processing meaningful payment volume?
At minimum: merchant underwriting, real-time fraud screening, chargeback and dispute handling, and payout coordination. These requirements scale with transaction volume and typically can’t be handled by the same team or systems that built the platform’s original software product.
Should a SaaS platform build its own payments infrastructure or use a partner?
It depends on scale and risk tolerance. Building in-house means owning compliance, underwriting, and fraud monitoring indefinitely. Many platforms instead integrate with a dedicated payments provider to get processing, fraud protection, and chargeback management through one connection instead of managing several vendors separately.
How fast is embedded payments adoption growing among software platforms?
Quickly. Among vertical SaaS companies expanding into fintech, 87% now offer payments, up from 30% a year earlier, and the median payments attach rate has doubled in the same period. Contact Cartis to discuss what that means for your platform’s payments infrastructure.
