Software companies are increasingly treating embedded payments as a growth strategy rather than a back-office function, creating a new advisory opportunity for channel partners that can help customers increase adoption, improve margins and select the right payment providers.
Ben Weiner, global head of partner channel at Nuvei, told Channel Insider that payment optimization is becoming a board-level priority as businesses look for additional ways to monetize their customer bases and strengthen retention.
“It is being driven at a board level, importantly,” Weiner said. “And that is bringing a whole new level of strategic thought and intentionality to the discussion.”
Payments become a strategic growth lever
For software businesses in particular, Weiner sees payments as an increasingly important component of the company’s overall financial model.
Payment optimization can include increasing embedded-payment adoption, improving transaction economics, selecting providers, redesigning customer experiences and building the organizational structure needed to support growth.
“Payments is almost always going to be accretive to the base software growth until you start to get extremely mature in your captive payments business,” Weiner said.
The potential impact extends beyond top-line growth. Weiner said a sufficiently mature payments operation can account for 20% to 35% of a software company’s EBITDA while also improving customer stickiness and providing another way to monetize its customer base.
Those economics help explain why payments are moving beyond a technical integration conversation and becoming a broader business strategy.
For channel partners, that creates opportunities to assess payment adoption, evaluate providers, integrate embedded-payment capabilities and advise customers on the organizational and go-to-market changes required to monetize them.
Three stages of payment maturity shape partner opportunities
Weiner sees companies falling into three broad groups.
Some already have a successful payments strategy and need resources to sustain their momentum. Others have built a sizable payments business somewhat passively and are now considering how deliberate investment could accelerate it.
The final group has yet to seriously capitalize on payments.
For those businesses, Weiner cautions against spending too much time designing the perfect strategy before acting.
“They’re better off acting quickly, learning, trying things, versus trying to get it 100% optimized before they even start,” he said. “But I’m envious of that group, in terms of what opportunity there is, in terms of growing their P&L.”
That opportunity can require confronting existing technology and vendor decisions.
“It’s not like that group hasn’t heard of payments or someone at the board hasn’t mentioned payments or pushed on it,” Weiner said. “It’s that they think they have something in place with the wrong vendor on the wrong scale, with the wrong strategy.”
Each stage presents a different opening for partners. Companies starting from scratch may need provider and integration guidance, while more mature businesses may need help increasing adoption, improving economics or reorganizing teams around payments growth.
Increasing payment adoption requires organizational change
Companies with established payments businesses face a different problem: how to continue increasing adoption after capturing the easiest customers.
Weiner divides that adoption curve into thirds. The first third often comes relatively organically through an embedded payments offering. Capturing the next two thirds requires stronger products, go-to-market execution, and penetration of the existing customer base.
“Almost all of the examples that we’ve seen accelerate through that second third and continue to monetize their portfolio, it starts with org design and having executive leadership or executive sponsorship focused on payments,” Weiner said.
Businesses can struggle when payment responsibilities are scattered across different functions, with no single leader owning the results.
That gives partners another potential advisory role: helping customers assess whether their organizational structure can support their payment ambitions.
Provider selection moves beyond revenue sharing
As more businesses recognize the complexity involved, Weiner expects vendor and partner selection to receive greater scrutiny through the remainder of 2026 and into 2027.
“I think where the conversation then shifts is really putting vendor selection or partner selection under a spotlight,” he said.
And the criteria companies use to make those decisions could change. Weiner pointed to a broader, more holistic understanding of what a technology partner brings to the table beyond profit margins.
“It’s not about who’s going to pay the last dollar to me in terms of revenue share,” Weiner said. “It’s about who has the resources from a people perspective to work with me on my strategy and help me co-sell and optimize.”
How channel partners can assess payment opportunities
Nuvei itself positions its partner offering around ISVs, platform providers, ISOs, and referral partners, including support for embedded payments and collaborative go-to-market programs.
The company offers a variety of solutions designed to address payment needs across marketplaces, online retail, financial services, and crypto programs, among others.
For partners approaching customers about payments optimization, Weiner recommends beginning with a two- to three-year assessment:
- What level of payments adoption is realistically achievable?
- How does that compare with similar software businesses?
- How much growth will come from new customers versus the installed base?
Only then should companies assess organizational design, vendor selection and the additional investment required to reach those goals.
“The ROI is good. The lifetime value is good on these customers,” Weiner said. But without committing additional resources, he added, “I don’t think you can look in the mirror and say, I honestly tried.”
For channel partners, the opportunity is to move payments beyond implementation and into business consulting, helping customers quantify the potential, identify adoption barriers and build a payment strategy capable of producing measurable growth.