Platforms as Fintech Entry Points
Jareau Wadé, Chief Growth Officer at Finix, on building payments infrastructure for SaaS companies
The important shift is that distribution in fintech is moving away from standalone payment signups and toward software products that already run a business or a consumer’s money life. A restaurant starts taking cards inside Toast, a retailer turns on payments inside Lightspeed, and a Cash App or Chime user begins with a wallet or account before adding more money movement. In each case, the platform owns onboarding, support, and the daily workflow, which lets it pull more users into financial services than a processor selling merchant accounts one by one.
-
For software platforms, payments is not just a feature, it changes the business model. Toast was cited as making almost 80% of revenue from payments, which shows why vertical SaaS companies push to embed processing instead of sending merchants to a separate provider.
-
The practical advantage is control of the customer experience. In the Clubessential example, a gym no longer has to call one company for software and another for a declined charge. The platform can see the transaction, answer support, and keep more of the economics.
-
The same pattern shows up on the consumer side. Chime and Cash App attract users with a primary money app, then keep transfers, deposits, card spend, and other services inside one system. That is cheaper to operate and makes the app the entry point into broader fintech usage.
This points toward a market where the winners are the companies that become the default operating layer for a niche, not the ones that only process transactions. As more vertical SaaS platforms and consumer finance apps own the first touchpoint, infrastructure providers like Finix become the picks and shovels that let them turn software distribution into payments volume and then into lending, banking, and payouts.