Payments Powering Vertical SaaS
Jareau Wadé, Chief Growth Officer at Finix, on building payments infrastructure for SaaS companies
The key point is that vertical SaaS economics often end up being driven more by payment volume than by subscription seats. For a company like Toast, the software gets the restaurant in the door, but the larger revenue stream comes every time that restaurant runs a card, because payments scale with gross merchandise volume while software fees grow more slowly with locations and add on products. This is exactly the model Finix is helping platforms build.
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Toast makes this visible in its revenue lines. In 2024, Toast reported $4.053B of financial technology solutions revenue versus $706M of subscription services revenue, so about 82% of revenue came from payments and other fintech flows rather than software subscriptions alone.
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That mix changes how a software company behaves. Once it embeds payments, every extra dollar its merchants process becomes revenue for the platform, which is why payments can outweigh SaaS fees even when the company is still clearly selling software as its main product experience.
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Finix is built for the hard operational part of this shift. A platform with thousands of sub merchants has to handle onboarding, settlement, disputes, refunds, reporting, and payouts across many sellers at once. Finix provides the API layer and bank processor connections so the software company can own that flow without building the whole stack itself.
Going forward, more vertical software companies will look less like pure SaaS and more like transaction driven fintech. The winners will be the platforms that control merchant workflow first, then capture payments, lending, and other money movement on top, which makes infrastructure providers like Finix increasingly important as those platforms scale.