Embedded payment tools make inroads

Beyond payments, digital wallets from Apple and Google traditionally haven’t done much. 

In the future, however, wallets are likely to become commerce platforms where consumer brands extend their loyalty and marketing pitches far more than they do today, said Eric Senn, the co-founder and CEO of Badge, a software startup that offers infrastructure for companies to interface with wallets.

Wallets will “become more and more dynamic,” Senn said Monday in an interview. “We’re still kind of in that phase where you’re taking physical loyalty cards and gift cards and we’re digitizing them. But within that digitization, there’s this huge opportunity for things to become alive and more dynamic, truly interactive for the customer.”

Atop increasing wallet use for payments, Americans are also diversifying their wallets to house an array of identification and other digital needs: Drivers licenses, concert and sports tickets, passports loyalty cards and airline boarding passes.

Badge, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2023 and calls itself “the operating platform for mobile wallets.” 

Badge customers use its technology to enable wallet push notifications, real-time updates and geofencing, so the phone wallet knows where you are and merchants can automatically drop pitches to the wallet. “If you have a loyalty card, you pull into a parking lot, you get an offer that pops up in the wallet,” Senn said.

Last month, Badge announced that it had raised $13.8 million from a series of investors led by Atlanta-based venture capital firm TTV Capital, with others including payment processor Stripe, Synchrony Ventures and Infinity Ventures. The capital raise brought Badge’s total funding to date to $17.1 million.

Lynne Laube, the co-founder and former CEO of Cardlytics, an advertising platform, and a partner at TTV Capital, will join Badge’s board of directors as part of the firm's investment.

Badge maintains “a very close relationship” with Apple and Google and formal contractual partnerships with both companies through which it offers customer feedback, Senn said.

Both tech giants offer guidelines on what functions can and can’t be done within their wallets and listen to feedback and suggestions from merchants about changes they’d like to see, Senn said.

“And then we go to Apple and Google and we’re like, ‘hey, just so you know, this is the feedback we're getting,’” he said. “And sometimes they implement it, sometimes they don't. It’s a little bit of a push and pull.”

Badge’s customers include Carrefour Group, the European grocery and retail giant; HOKA, a footwear brand owned by Deckers Outdoor; and Shift4 Payments, the large point-of-sale merchant services provider with a major sports venue business. Badge declined to disclose how many customers it has.

Instead of sending customers email, Carrefour can now put offers into customers’ wallets as they drive into a store parking lot, Senn said. “It’s just kind of using the existing programs and extending them into a much more preferable channel.”

Badge focuses on three of the most popular U.S. wallets — Apple, Google and Samsung — although the latter accounts for less than 1% in Badge’s business, Senn said. For businesses, this trio presents a challenge because each wallet is technically unique “and the wallets are constantly changing and evolving,” he said.

“That's why we built this infrastructure layer that gives companies a single entry point into the wallets and allows them to build a lot faster, and it also allows them to do more.”

Badge earns money through a software access fee for its platform and a fee for each push notification a customer wants to send to the wallet, similar to the charges retailers pay for sending their customers SMS text notifications, Senn said.

Wallet innovations from Badge and others are likely to come as virtual cards also delve more deeply into personalization, with new technical capabilities from fintech card issuers. 

Mike Milotich, the chief executive of Marqeta, a digital card issuer and embedded finance company, predicted Monday that consumer loyalty programs will become a natural fit for personalized offers via cards.

“If you and I have the same credit card today we get the exact same reward,” he said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco. “We don’t think that’ll be the case in the future. Everything else is personalized and customized in technology and we think that’s going to come to card.”

Artificial intelligence “will take it to the next level” to adjust in real-time and to craft unique consumer offers via cards, Milotich said.

The quest for speedier payment bedevils many businesses but those in the construction trades might suffer even longer lags. 

Their invoicing and accounts receivable systems are critical – but many older financial platforms used in building trades don’t provide for modern payment and accounting options, according to Payra, a software startup that automates accounts receivable operations.

Payra’s software integrates with most enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms that are designed to help “blue collar” industrial companies modernize their cash collection functions.

Last month, Payra announced a $15 million investment from Edison Partners, an investment firm, to help speed its growth. While that’s the first and only fundraising event for the company so far, Payra has ambitions to transform payments in the construction industry.

The startup’s services aim to assist construction and building materials suppliers in accepting digital payments like cards and ACH, and to automate the reconciliation inside their legacy finance systems that often lack API (application programming interface) connections.

Via artificial intelligence-enabled technology, a payment “is actually now incorporated into my system of record, like the pacemaker of my business, and that largely, not to use too much hyperbole, wasn’t really possible before,” co-founder Thomas Cecil said last week in an interview. 

“The magic for [companies] is that they’ve been basically told for the last 20 years, ‘Hey, you can accept credit cards, but you’re going to have to just figure out what that ties to,’” Cecil said. 

Multiple companies provide accounts receivable automation products, such as BillTrust, Growfin and Versapay. Payra says its solution integrates with nearly every legacy ERP platform, even those nearly 30 years old, without requiring contractors to make large investments to replace their existing systems.

“The vast, vast, vast majority of these businesses, they’re on ERP systems the general public probably hasn't heard of, so the challenge is working with what they have in place versus pitching them a rip-and-replace strategy,” Cecil said.

The company – founded two years ago in Nashville, Tennessee – focuses on larger general contractors, such as commercial concrete, lumber, heating, ventilation and air conditioning and electrical trades. 

The 14-employee company relies primarily on direct sales for growth and the Edison investment will aid expansion, Cecil said. The Edison investment was Payra’s first outside capital after being "bootstrapped" by the founders, co-founder and CEO Riley Lovingood said during the interview. 

“The biggest piece is alleviating a lot of the friction and making a general contractor have to go through hoops to pay somebody,” Lovingood said. “We’re providing more access to make it easier for them to pay…straight from the invoice on their phone, on their computer, right there.”

These companies generally operate with legacy ERP systems and not retail-oriented software, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, Lovingood and Cecil said in the interview.

Lovingood is a former staffer for U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican. Cecil, a serial technology entrepreneur, is Payra’s head of product.

Most companies in the space have no means of capturing payments or data from their paid receivables and integrating it with their finance functions, even if they can send invoices with electronic payment links, Cecil said. 

Many of these firms still navigate paper invoices, paper checks and spreadsheets to manage their receivables, said Lovingood.

Payra makes money from a percentage of its transactions, the co-founders said. Payra’s credit card payments average $3,500, but “it was not weird for us to see credit card transactions north of $400,000,” Lovingood said.

Payra targets companies that are dominant in their region but still fragmented as their industries haven’t consolidated heavily, Lovingood said, noting as an example the 12,000-company U.S. ready-mix concrete industry.

“They each dominate a circular radius between where the plants are because it’s a perishable product, you can’t ship concrete,” he said. “It's very fragmented or balkanized. Everybody sort of has their own territory.”

Payra considered using Stripe or PayPal Holdings’ Braintree enterprise payment solution within its business, but found them unworkable for its needs, Cecil said. “You can’t do that in this business because the tickets are so large that the risk controls of those modern processors will pend the payment or block the payment,” he said.

Sponsored content

By NMI

Should you build or buy a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for your payments business? That’s a question you’ll likely run into at some point during your company’s growth, especially as the limits of generic CRM systems become more apparent.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. Building allows you to custom design a solution ideally suited to your individual needs. Buying is simple and easy. To determine the best path for your business, you’ll need to analyze and balance the various benefits and drawbacks of each. Let’s take a look at the four key factors you’ll need to weigh when making this decision.

The “Four C’s” To Consider When Deciding Between Build vs. Buy

Generic CRM platforms often do so many general tasks that they’re difficult to learn and work with. But they also do so few industry-specific tasks that they ultimately don’t do enough. That double friction leads many payment companies to eventually hit a wall with generic solutions and consider going the custom route.

Depending on your size, your portfolio makeup, your business model and your internal experience, building a custom payments CRM may be the right choice for you. But it’s important to carefully weigh the upsides against the challenges that come with in-house development.

To get a clearer picture of which route is best for your company’s unique needs, you can examine the “Four C’s” of the build versus buy decision for payments CRMs: cost, completeness, compliance and cohesion.

Cost

The first big factor when considering build versus buy is the cost. Custom building a payments CRM is a very costly and time-consuming proposition that puts a big burden on your internal development team. Maintenance, updates and ongoing security also fall on your shoulders with a custom build. Or, if you don’t have an internal development team, you’ll need to contract an outside firm to do the custom work for you — an even more expensive proposition.

Those upfront and long-term costs have to be weighed against the cost of an off-the-shelf solution. It’s important to remember that while off-the-shelf CRMs are vastly cheaper upfront, to make an accurate comparison, you need to forecast the long-term cost of your subscription for as long as you think you’ll use the system. When viewed over longer time frames, the two estimates may start to get closer than you’d expect.

Completeness

The pain point driving you to consider a scratch-built payments CRM is likely a mismatch between your needs and the features you’re used to seeing in off-the-shelf solutions. Generic CRMs are designed to appeal to the widest possible market, and they’re often a very poor fit for companies in a unique industry like payments — especially when it comes to things like merchant management, residuals management and reporting. The big-name players offer enormous platforms packed with features — just not the ones you need.

Building your own payments CRM enables you to design your feature set to ideally match your company’s needs. That offers some clear upsides, but there are also some pitfalls. Most notably, it’s easy to build a solution that suits your business now, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be ready to scale as you grow and your needs change.

For instance, you may not need rapid onboarding or underwriting integration now, but you might in a few years when you’re significantly bigger. Or the way you generate earnings from payments may evolve alongside your business. As this happens, comprehensive residuals management and reporting will become more important. But, adding these types of major functions as you go can require expensive rework.

An alternative option is a payments-specific off-the-shelf CRM. Payments-specific CRMs are robust and feature-rich, but, unlike the big generic systems, every feature has been carefully designed to enhance merchant management and serve the unique needs of a payments company, regardless of its size or business model. That offers a mix of completeness and flexible, long-term utility that can be a major challenge to do in-house.

Compliance

The payments space is a favorite target for cybercriminals and fraudsters, and a business’s success depends on their compliance with the regulations and security protocols put in place by governments and card networks.

At a minimum, your payments CRM will need to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). That requires your team to have specific knowledge to ensure every necessary box is checked. Your system will also need to undergo regular security updates, penetration testing and recertification. All that can be a major burden thanks to the complexity of the payments threat environment.

On the other hand, if you choose an off-the-shelf solution, you may be able to shift the vast majority of the CRM security burden to your partner. That may not be true of generic solutions, but it’s a huge benefit offered by payments-specific CRMs, where it’s your partner’s job to understand the intricacies of payments security and to continuously maintain compliance with all relevant regulations and requirements.

Cohesion

Your CRM is a critical part of onboarding and merchant management. But it’s still just one part of your overall payments tech stack. You can use application program interfaces (APIs) or tools like Zapier to connect a custom-built CRM to your other software platforms, but that will always be an unoptimized solution that slows down processes and introduces friction for your employees.

On the other hand, getting a CRM solution from your payments partner can give you turnkey access to a system built for seamless integration with the rest of your payments stack. Everything from automated underwriting tools and processor connections to value-added merchant services and robust residuals management and reporting will seamlessly integrate with your CRM right out of the box. This creates a more holistic experience that makes selling payments and serving merchants easier and more profitable.

Getting Started With the Right Payments CRM

If you land on the “buy” route, finding the right off-the-shelf solution is key to maximizing your return on investment and getting the most from your new technology. And, if you’re operating in the payments space, there is no better choice than NMI Merchant Central.

NMI Merchant Central is the most complete payments CRM available today. It’s designed to tackle all the most important operational tasks involved with payments, from sales to onboarding to residuals management and beyond. It’s also designed to be flexible, with modular capabilities that ensure it can serve you better than any generic CRM, no matter how you manage merchants. Lastly, it will scale with you seamlessly as you grow and your needs change.

Just some of NMI Merchant Central’s major benefits include:

• Better lead and merchant management that helps you deliver more personalized, more effective sales and ongoing service
• Faster onboarding that reduces errors and cuts a 30-minute task down to five minutes or less
• Automated residuals that eliminate manual calculations and help you pay out stakeholders faster
• Smarter decision-making thanks to easy-to-access, fully customizable reporting on your portfolio and all your merchants
• Frictionless integration with the rest of the NMI ecosystem, including ScanX automated onboarding, the NMI Gateway, value-added services and more
• Simplified compliance thanks to full PCI Level 1 certification and one of the industry’s most experienced security teams
• Fast, effortless integration with your existing tech stack and daily operations

To learn more about how easy and cost-effective it is to plug the industry’s most powerful CRM into your payments business, reach out to a member of our team today.

Not ready to chat? Explore Merchant Central’s payments CRM on your own with our virtual demo.

As agentic commerce evolves, Stripe and other payment players anticipate a gradual process for this evolution. 

Today, you’re explaining to an AI bot what kind of yoga gear your sister likes and evaluating the options it finds before you handle the payment. But one day, this search-review-pay process will likely happen without you for your sister to receive a gift.

“Like much in AI, agentic commerce suffers from having been overhyped too early in some corners,” Stripe’s co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, wrote Tuesday in their annual letter, which touched on their views of how agentic shopping will expand gradually across the digital retail world. 

“People paint a utopian picture of autonomous agents planning and executing all your commerce by knowing your every whim.”

Instead, they wrote, agentic commerce is likely to morph in “small chunks.” 

They categorized these chunks as five levels, layered from the current rudimentary options to a future fifth stage at which an agent – fully aware of your shopping needs and budget – operates without direction. In the Collisons’ ultimate “futuristic vision” example, a child’s back-to-school supplies are purchased and delivered based on the calendar and past budgets.

The second level is more descriptive, telling an agent about a situation for a purchase, as opposed to providing specific attributes, according to the letter. “Today, the industry is hovering on the edge of levels 1 and 2,” the Collisons wrote.

The financial potential is large, according to analyst forecasts. 

About 81% of consumers are inclined to use agentic commerce tools, potentially affecting $1.3 trillion of spending, according to a survey of 2,532 people last year by Boston Consulting Group. An October McKinsey report on agentic commerce pegged the retail sales opportunity as high as $1 trillion for goods in the U.S. by 2030, and up to $5 trillion globally, not including spending on services. 

The same measured approach to agentic commerce is shared by a Stripe-funded startup, Circuit & Chisel, which says it’s “building the foundational technologies that will enable agentic payments and movement around the web.” 

The company raised $19.2 million in September to launch ATXP, an agent transaction protocol, to help AI agents navigate the internet and complete transactions, connecting AI and commerce with fewer glitches.

Circuit & Chisel was co-founded by two former Stripe executives – CEO Louis Amira, who was formerly head of crypto and AI partnerships at the larger payments company. David Noel-Romas, who was Stripe’s head of crypto engineering, is Circuit & Chisel’s chief technology officer. They left Stripe last year.

“Agents are very likely our target customer moving forwards, which is a thing that got me laughed out of some rooms a year ago, and now sounds way more plausible for a lot more people,” Amira said Monday in an interview.

The New York-based company hopes to become the critical source of tools agentic bots need to improve their function, regardless of whether an agent is from Amazon, Apple, Google or some other provider, Amira said

“We expect all of them to fight like hell to be the agent that you think about,” he said. “We want Siri or Nigel or Alexa or whatever, to reach for our tools in order to be able to go make things work,” he said, referring to branded AI assistants.

To that end, Circuit & Chisel offers agents email addresses, and is working to provision memory, access to images and payments options as part of its queries to some of the agents now online. “We’re going to keep seeing what they request and just keep adding those things over time,” Amira said.

Amid all the current churn within the AI world, including the various agentic protocols from massive companies like Stripe, Google and OpenAI, the final forms of how agentic commerce will work is still too early to call, Amira said.

“We’re reminded of those few years in the mid-90s when the structure of the internet we use today was hashed out,” the Stripe co-founders wrote Tuesday, noting the different protocols and providers proffering various approaches.

Said Amira: “Nobody’s really willing to place massive bets on any of this stuff at this point, because it’s just so unclear.”

Dive Brief:

• Card networks Visa and Mastercard both expect development of digital identity tools to take center stage this year, the companies said in separate online posts last month. Verifying identities has become crucial in allowing consumers and businesses to make payments, and avoid fraud, at a time when artificial intelligence is transforming commerce, they explained.
• Payments technology and software firm ACI Worldwide predicted last month that real-time payments, along with mobile wallets and new digital asset rails, will get more traction this year as they offer a channel to draw more individuals into the financial system.
• Fleet services provider Wex sees embedded payments gathering momentum this year, particularly for business-to-business payments, according to its forecast last month. It pointed to a projection from consulting firm Bain that heralded $7 trillion in embedded payments volume for 2026, for a more than two-fold increase over the past five years, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

Many companies in the payments sphere have pointed to AI, stablecoins and agentic commerce as key themes this year for the industry, but there are a number of other trends picking up speed. That’s due mainly to the dramatic impact of new technology in the payments arena in recent years that have changed consumers’ digital habits and forced regulators to catch up to the changes. 

Visa, and its no. 2 rival Mastercard, are particularly focused on how to guard legitimate payments in the new AI age, and fend off fraudulent transactions. It won’t be easy.

“2026 will, unfortunately, see a material increase in the sophistication and volume of these AI powered identity attacks,” Visa Group President Oliver Jenkyn said in the company’s Dec. 15 post. “This escalation will herald a new AI battle for identity with increased investment, focus and partnership.”

Mastercard is also preparing for agentic commerce in which computerized bots, or agents, shop on behalf of consumers, and maybe even make payments. “The industry is focused on how to identify that an agent is legitimate, how to strengthen authentication with agents and reduce fraud, and how to capture intent in case an AI transaction goes awry,” Mastercard said in its Dec. 3 post regarding 2026 trends. 

Agents involved in this type of commerce will rely on Mastercard’s tokenization technology, as do digital wallets, the network’s chief digital officer, Pablo Fourez, said in an interview last month.

“Mastercard tokens will provide [the agents] access, and they then agree to work with us to make this transaction secure,” Fourez explained. “One of the things that happens is, then, when they're accessing a merchant site, they can identify themselves to the merchant.”

Payments generally are happening at a faster pace, thanks to speedier digital rails.

Since the roll-out of real-time payments in the U.S. by The Clearing House and the Federal Reserve over the past decade, banks have slowly begun to offer such services to consumers and businesses. But the availability of such instant payments could pick up this year, said Philip Bruno, ACI’s chief strategy and growth officer.

“I think we're going to see more adoption [of real-time payments] next year, and I think that adoption will be at an increasing pace,” Bruno said during an interview last month. 

He cited the arrival of more use cases for real-time payments as a driver for that growth, specifically noting the Treasury Department’s decision in October to use the method for delivery of some Federal Emergency Management Agency distributions.

Meanwhile, Wex is focused on how businesses, like consumers, will increasingly rely on payments almost invisibly tucked into their daily routines.

“We’ve all experienced embedded payments in our personal lives — booking a ride, ordering takeout, or paying a subscription without ever leaving the app,” the company said in its list of 2026 trends to watch. “That same expectation is coming to B2B.”