What This Year’s Conferences Taught Us About Embedded Payments

Spend a year at fintech and software conferences and one thing becomes very clear: AI may dominate the stages, but many of the conversations underneath it eventually come back to the same question. How does the software business actually make money? Increasingly, payments are part of the answer. We’ll be continuing that conversation in person at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

It’s been a full conference year. Fintech shows, software conferences, more product demos than any one person should sit through between February and November. Different logos on the badge, different keynote decks, but remarkably similar conversations once people got past the small talk.

Everyone wanted to talk about AI. Every stage, every hallway huddle defaulted to agents, copilots and what generative anything might replace next. But listen long enough and the conversation usually moved from what AI can do to how the product behind it creates value. How does the business monetize it? Who owns the customer experience? And when an AI-powered experience results in a transaction, what infrastructure makes that transaction actually happen?

For most software companies, payments sit right in the middle of those questions. They are not simply a function that gets added once the rest of the product is built. They can become part of the experience, the commercial model and the relationship a software company has with its customers.

That’s not just a feeling from too many expo halls, and that opportunity isn’t new. In 2020, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) highlighted the potential for vertical software companies to significantly increase revenue per customer by adding financial services. Six years later, the broader point has become increasingly visible: payments can represent a meaningful revenue stream alongside software subscriptions.

Toast is the proof most people already know without realizing it. In 2025, Toast’s financial technology solutions revenue reached $5.04 billion against $936 million in subscription services revenue. That does not make the software any less important. Quite the opposite. The software creates the relationship and the experience. Payments deepen that relationship and give the platform another way to grow with its customers.

Skip that shift and someone else builds it for you, on your customers, with your margin. That is why treating payments as something to deal with “later” can become a strategic decision, whether you intend it to or not.

If another provider owns the payments experience, that means:

• They may own a significant part of the merchant relationship
• Onboarding speed becomes someone else’s service-level agreement (SLA) to hit or miss
• The software company gives up some of the economics and control that could otherwise sit inside its platform

For a software company that has already earned the customer relationship, that can mean leaving value on the table.

Here’s the part most of those conference conversations still miss: owning more of the payments experience no longer has to mean building an entire payments stack yourself.

Application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs) and pre-built embeddable components, the kind you drop into an existing product instead of standing up a payments team from scratch, are what made this practical for software companies that don’t want “add payments” to become a multi-quarter engineering project. That can include accepting payments, but it can also extend further into the merchant experience, giving users access to transaction information, deposit data and other payment functionality without sending them out to a separate portal. The result is a different build-versus-buy equation. Software companies can keep the experience inside their platform while relying on payment infrastructure built to handle the complexity underneath it.

It’s the same shift behind NMI Payments, and we wrote about what that maturity phase looks like in practice. Worth a read if payments have been sitting on your roadmap next to “eventually.” If you want the revenue case laid out on its own, we covered that too.

Which brings us to TechCrunch Disrupt. This year, the event’s new Smart Money Stage opens on a line worth borrowing: “Money has evolved into far more than the cash in your wallet or your bank account.”

The stage is devoting sessions to stablecoins and instant payments, AI agents inside financial workflows and the infrastructure behind global commerce. Those might sound like separate topics. Increasingly, they aren’t. AI is changing how people interact with software. New payment rails are changing how money can move. And software companies are having to decide how much of that experience they want to own. That is the payments conversation we’ll keep having long after this year’s conference circuit ends.

We’ll be there. If a year of conference conversations has left you with the nagging sense that payments are the thing you keep postponing, Disrupt is a good place to settle it instead of carrying it into next year’s circuit. Find us at booth F4 at Moscone West, October 13–15, or reach out ahead of the show if you’d rather grab time before the crowds hit. We’re there for the conversation, not the pitch.