Jo Phillips and Will Corbera, co-founders of Payabli, joined PAYMENTS FM to talk about why vertical software platforms are becoming payments companies, how they think about risk and pricing, and what separates a payments program that works from one that fails.
State of Payments survey: It takes about four minutes, anonymous responses are welcome, and we will publish the results at the end of the year.
Why this matters
Vertical software platforms have been adding payments for close to a decade. Companies like ServiceTitan, Mindbody, and Toast did it early, moving off legacy processors and generic gateways into something built for their own industry.
The decision is easy to state and hard to execute. A platform has to decide how much of the payments business to own, how to price it, which risk model to use, and which of its industries actually need something more specialized than an off-the-shelf provider.
Jo Phillips and Will Corbera built the payments business at ServiceTitan before starting Payabli. Jo led sales there; Will had already built one of the industry’s first payment facilitators, focused on property management. Together, they turned ServiceTitan’s payments into a large revenue driver and a better customer experience, and that work is what led them to start Payabli.
Payments can be 20 percent or more of a platform’s revenue, but that number is not automatic. It depends on pricing, on the vertical, and on whether the platform built a genuinely embedded experience or just added a link to a third-party checkout.
Most platforms will not need to become a full payment facilitator. Understanding the referral, managed, and full PayFac options, and knowing which one fits, is one of the more consequential decisions a platform makes.
What to watch
Watch the signals that show whether a payments program is built to last.
Whether payments is sold as a feature or built as a full experience
Which vertical the platform serves, and how nuanced its unmet needs are
How risk is priced, and who is holding it
Onboarding friction and drop-off
GMV run-rate relative to the point where payments can support a dedicated team
Whether pricing reflects the value of the experience, or is set defensively low
Whether payouts to vendors and suppliers are part of the roadmap, not just acceptance
What it means for your team
Payments does not stay in one part of the org once a platform decides to build it.
Product owns onboarding and checkout. Engineering owns the integration and the reliability of money movement. Finance and revenue teams care about pricing and margin. Risk has to decide how much exposure the platform is willing to hold, and how that changes as volume grows.
Jo and Will describe this as a “crawl, walk, run” process. A platform can start with a lighter-touch integration and take on more control, and more risk, over time, without rebuilding the underlying stack. What has to be in place from the start is a clear owner: someone whose job is to manage payments as an ongoing business, not a project that ships once and gets left alone.
What to do next
Map which of the “three Ps” (pay in, pay out, pay ops) the platform already offers, and which are missing
Get a clear answer on how risk is priced today, and what changes at different volume tiers
Review onboarding for friction points before adding new payment features
Revisit pricing against the value of the experience, not just against competitors
Identify who inside the company owns payments as an ongoing operating responsibility
Decide, deliberately, whether referral, managed PayFac, or full PayFac fits the platform’s stage and risk appetite
Questions to ask internally
Are we treating payments as a feature or as a business?
Do we know how much of our revenue payments could realistically represent?
Who owns risk today, and does that match what we actually want to hold?
Is our onboarding flow a reason customers drop off?
Are we pricing payments to reflect the value of the experience, or just to win the deal?
Do we have anyone whose job is to manage payments day to day, or is it everyone’s part-time responsibility?
Have we actually compared referral, managed PayFac, and full PayFac against our own volume and risk appetite?
Guest perspective
Payments as a feature earns a platform the right to payments as a business, but it can’t just be a feature set — the product experience has to come first.
Payabli’s differentiator is the “three Ps”: pay in, pay out, and pay ops unified into one stack, instead of separate providers for cards, ACH, payouts, onboarding, and risk.
Who owns the risk is a business decision, not a fixed model — platforms can hold full risk, share it, or hand it to Payabli, depending on their appetite and the economics they want.
Payabli focuses on “need-to-pay” verticals — property management, government, utilities, education, healthcare, law, and insurance — where the last 20 percent of the need is hard to solve without deep vertical knowledge.
The two most common failure modes are a weak onboarding experience and underpricing payments because it was easier to sell that way than to build the case for a fair price.
Resources
Related episodes
Open Banking and Pay by Bank with Anubhav Pradhan, ShiftMate
Benefits of Payment Orchestration with Zubin Vandrevala, Gr4vy
The Right Way to Integrate a Payment Provider: Michael Taylor, Checkout.com
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