White Labeling SaaS Payments: Reinforcing Your Brand and Establishing Deeper Value

Your brand matters. You put a lot of thought and money into designing and establishing it, and you spend good money promoting it. So, why would you give away brand exposure for nothing?

In the embedded payments world, it’s common for software companies to forfeit payments-side branding to their technology partners; they assume that’s just the way things work. But with white-labeling, the brand impressions generated from merchant services and checkout could be yours.

The benefits of that exposure include improved user preference, reduced friction during the payments experience and longer, stickier customer relationships. And, most importantly, having your brand front and center during every transaction on your platform.

So, let’s look at branding in embedded payments, how white labeling can put your brand in the spotlight and why it’s such an important opportunity for your software company.

What is the value of a brand impression? It’s impossible to pin down a specific number, but brand impressions unquestionably have a financial value. After all, you spend a lot of time, effort and money every month to get your name out.

Now imagine a situation in which you aren’t just missing out on valuable impressions (that would cost you little to nothing to capture) but you’re actually giving them away to another company. Maybe even a distant competitor?

Unfortunately, that exact situation happens far too often when software companies embed payment systems from third-party providers. Here’s why:

An Unnecessary Cost of No- and Low-Code Embedded Payments 

No-code and low-code payments integrations are extremely powerful because they allow you to enter the payments business without taking on the costs of custom development or the burden of learning the ins and outs of a complex industry. But far too many payment providers use things like mandatory “powered by” tags, static color schemes and even prominent logos to effectively force their own branding into your platform.

Whether it’s a business user signing up for merchant services through your ecosystem or someone making a purchase through a checkout embedded in your software, they click through to engage with a payment journey and, bam — someone else’s branding.

You’ve not only lost out on a brand impression that could’ve been yours, but you’ve created a sense of unease for the end-user, who will wonder why they’re being asked for payment details by another company. That’s a huge missed opportunity to promote your brand and provide a more seamless user experience. Luckily, it’s an easy problem to fix through white labeling.

White labeling is the process of putting your branding onto someone else’s product in order to present it as your own. There is no shortage of white labeling opportunities with embedded payments. All you have to do is find a technology partner willing to forego their own branding for the betterment of yours.

Assuming you’re a business-to-business (B2B) software provider offering payments services to your business users, some key white-labeling opportunities include:

• Merchant sign-up: Whether you send your users to an external sign-up page to fill out a merchant application, deliver it to them in an iframe or custom-build it within your platform, you should ensure they see your brand at every step of the process. Even though they’re technically signing up with a third-party payment processor, they should feel like they’ve never left your environment, and you are the provider
• Account management: Your users will need a way to manage their payments accounts to do things like access reporting, submit new account information, sign up for new add-on services, access support and more. The portal they do this through is a huge opportunity for white-label branding, and it might be something you can get turnkey access to through your payments partner
• Checkout: If your users make any purchases either directly through your software or on an external checkout redirect, ensure the checkout experience appears to be powered by you and not by a third-party. This is one of the most common places third-party branding sneaks through, and also one of the easiest to white label

Talk to potential partners about whether or not they offer these types of white-labeling opportunities. Certain embedded payments platforms, like NMI, offer extensive white labeling as a standard part of services. If white labeling is available, taking advantage of it is an easy decision.

There are three key ways you stand to benefit from white labeling your embedded software payments:

1. Baking your brand into your users’ minds and establishing preference
2. Minimizing the potentially jarring user experience of brand shifting
3. Creating longer-lasting relationships by becoming less replaceable

1) White-Label Payments Ingrain Your Brand in Your Users’ Minds

Repeated brand exposure is critical for building familiarity and trust with your users. The psychological phenomenon known as the mere-exposure effect tells us that people develop preferences for things they see often. You experience that constantly when you interact with your favorite consumer brands, but there’s no reason it can’t benefit software, too. Take advantage of the opportunity to start boosting your users’ preference for your platform through mere exposure.

2) White-Label Payments Keep Your Users in a Comfortable, Familiar Environment

Context switching is the cognitive cost that’s paid every time a user has to jump from one task to another. Moving between brands can produce a similar drain, especially in a payments context. Some users find it jarring to land on a page or process that suddenly appears to be outside the context (in this case, brand) in which they started. That can be a big problem with checkouts, and it can also potentially derail sign-up. White labeling keeps your entire payments experience within a single, familiar brand context, ensuring minimal friction as users interact with your offerings.

3) White-Label Payments Create Stickier Long-Term User Relationships

Your embedded payment services are ultimately powered by a third-party partner, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from being perceived as the provider. The more your users run into a third-party’s branding, the more likely they’ll view you as a middleman in a process they could get directly (maybe even at a lower cost.) But if your brand is front and center, users are more likely to see you as their provider and a more critical partner in their success. That makes you less replaceable and results in stickier users with higher lifetime values.

Brand impressions are too valuable and too important to give away to third parties, so white labeling is a critical part of monetizing the payments that flow through your software. NMI understands that, which is why we’ve made extensive white labeling a core part of what we do.

From sign-up to ongoing account management to support, checkout and beyond, we make it easy to put your branding first. Because, ultimately, your success in embedded payments is what drives ours. Your brand identity is the top priority.

To find out more about the many white-labeling opportunities across the entire NMI ecosystem, reach out to a member of our team today.