Finance Leaders Demand No Lock-in
Michelle Valentine, co-founder and CEO of Anrok, on the modularization of the SaaS finance stack
Multiple payment processors are usually a sign that the finance stack is optimizing for cost control, sales flexibility, and redundancy, not simplicity. Large B2B customers often pay by ACH to avoid card fees, while self serve and international flows still run through card processors like Stripe or Braintree. As pricing, contract structure, and geographies get more complex, finance teams want a tax and billing layer that can sit across all of those channels instead of forcing everything into one vendor.
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ACH shows up almost everywhere because enterprise invoices can be large enough that card fees materially cut into margin. Card processors stay in the stack for online checkout, subscriptions, and faster setup, so companies end up running both rails in parallel.
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A second processor is also insurance. As companies scale, they do not want revenue collection tied to one gateway, one underwriting decision, or one platform outage. That is why larger businesses often split payment volume across several providers and then reconcile the data downstream.
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This is why platform specific tax products break down for larger SaaS companies. Stripe Tax is useful inside Stripe, but it only covers Stripe transactions. Merchant of record models like Paddle remove tax work, but they also take over the customer relationship and payment flow, which many SaaS companies do not want.
The direction of travel is toward more orchestration, not less. As SaaS pricing gets more usage based, multi product, and global, companies will keep mixing payment rails, billing systems, and ERPs. The winners in this stack will be the systems that can aggregate data across tools, calculate tax correctly, and let finance teams swap components without rebuilding the whole workflow.