Retailers, marketplaces and travel firms are building payments into their products. Lending and accounts are a step most will avoid, executives say.
Retailers, marketplaces and travel firms are adding payments to products that have nothing to do with finance. They process their own transactions, take a cut, and some lend or hold customer money. The industry calls this the platformisation of payments, and the claim behind it is that every business is becoming a fintech.
Three executives whose companies supply this infrastructure say the claim goes too far. Payments are embedding deeper into non-financial products. However lending and current accounts are not.
When it pays to run your own payments
A business should only bring payments in-house once it is processing high volumes, said Nick Fernando, Co-Founder and Director of Aqua Global Solutions. Below that, a third-party processor costs less to run. “If not, you’re probably better off with a third-party PSP to keep things simple,” he said.
A company running large volumes across several markets, handling refunds, split payments and subscriptions, has more to gain.
Fernando cited a marketplace: it takes the card payment, pays the seller, deducts its commission, processes refunds and chargebacks, then reconciles each one against the original order. “At that point, payment orchestration becomes operational infrastructure, not just a checkout button,” he said.
The revenue does not come as easily as the sector claims, Fernando said. Take rates are falling as more providers compete for the same transactions, and fraud, compliance, support, refunds and chargebacks reduce what is left. Companies that profit from payments treat them as part of how the business operates – fewer failed transactions, faster merchant onboarding, more customer data – not a separate revenue line.
A platform cannot pick the highest-yielding option and leave it there, said Lucas Outumuro, VP, Institutional DeFi at Sentora. It needs systems that price risk and spread money across several strategies.
“The opportunity is not necessarily for every company to become a bank, but for platforms to use financial infrastructure to create better experiences and new revenue streams,” he said.
Relying on a single provider or protocol concentrates risk, Outumuro said, the main lesson from the collapses in banking-as-a-service. A product built on one venue is limited; infrastructure that spreads exposure across several strategies is more durable.
Payments yes, banking no
“The idea that every business will become a fintech was always too broad,” said Andrew Harrison-Chinn, Business Leader at Dragonpass. Most firms do not want a banking licence, he said; they want control over the moments in the customer journey where money changes hands, and a partner to run the regulated parts underneath.
Retail and travel have gone furthest because payment already sits at the centre of the transaction, Harrison-Chinn said. Companies fail when they move into lending or accounts without a clear reason a customer would want them, he said, because credit and deposits bring far more regulation and operational cost than payments.
Most businesses do not want to be banks, Fernando said. “What they want is more control over the financial moments that sit inside their customer journey.” Lending and accounts work where a platform holds strong data and a clear use case, but most companies will not go that far, he said. “Payments will keep embedding deeper, but not every platform will move into full financial services.”
The value in owning payments is the data, Harrison-Chinn said. A payment marks the moment a customer decides to buy, and what it reveals about behaviour lets a brand reward the customer inside the transaction instead of through a separate loyalty scheme afterwards.
Firms already in finance — fintechs, exchanges, platforms with existing money relationships — are embedding fastest, Outumuro said. Sentora works with large exchanges that add earning and borrowing features while hiding the underlying complexity from users, a model he calls “CeFi in the front, DeFi in the back”.
The agent problem
AI agents buying on a customer’s behalf change what a platform must check before a payment clears. “It is no longer just whether the customer can pay easily, it’s can the platform prove who authorised the payment, why it was triggered and whether the agent was allowed to do it?” Fernando said.
Fernando gave an example: an agent cleared to reorder office supplies under £500 from an approved supplier, but blocked from opening a new supplier account or signing a £20,000 software contract. Identity, permissions and reconciliation matter more once an agent transacts on its own. “Agentic commerce will not work if payments disappear into a black box — data and transparency are essential,” he said.
The payment will need to carry more data with it, Harrison-Chinn said, so an agent can select the right benefit for the customer as it pays. Processing will keep getting cheaper and more commoditised, he said, and the money will sit in infrastructure that makes each transaction more relevant.
Outumuro sees money moving continuously in the background, allocated by a customer’s stated preferences and risk profile rather than by manual approval. The providers that succeed will combine an easy user experience with risk controls strong enough for banks and consumers to trust, he said, “without requiring them to build the entire stack themselves”.
