Merchant Services Need a Platform Playbook - Forward

Merchant Services Need a Platform Playbook

The future of payments is no longer just about moving transactions. According to the recently published BCG report, Global Payments Report 2025, the economics of merchant services are rapidly shifting toward platforms and value-added services.

“Core payments acceptance remains under pressure as pure transaction processing commoditizes, driving growth in value-added services and embedded finance.”

The study found that by 2027, value-added services could represent 30–35% of US acquiring revenue, with embedded finance contributing another 10–20%. That means nearly half of payments revenue will be driven by services and economics outside of traditional processing.

And the pressure on legacy models is mounting. As BCG notes:

“Merchant acquiring has long been a scale game. But scale no longer guarantees growth. Pricing pressure—especially among large corporates—continues to compress margins.”

Why Platforms Win

Software platforms are growing at twice the rate of digital acquirers and nearly three times that of incumbents. From 2020 to 2024, platforms increased their total revenue by roughly 40% annually. Why? Because they control the workflow, the customer relationship, and increasingly the financial layer that sits on top of it.

As the report points out, the shift is underway:

“Roughly half of the merchants that switched payment service providers in the past two years adopted embedded payments through their software platform. Most cited ease of use and better support as their main reasons for switching. Platform-linked merchants also reported materially higher net promoter scores than nonplatform peers did, underscoring the appeal of a seamless, integrated experience.”

Additionally, BCG notes that capturing the future of payments requires a platform playbook. That means:

Embedding payments natively into the software experience Payments must feel like part of the platform’s core workflows, not a disconnected add-on.
Driving high adoption across the customer base Payments only become a growth engine when the majority of end customers are actively using them.
Unlocking economics beyond the card swipe Expanding into additional flows, like payout orchestration, split funding, reconciliation, creates new value streams and deeper stickiness.

The Forward Playbook

This is exactly why we built Forward. We saw firsthand as SaaS founders and operators how hard it is to get payments right with legacy or modern scale processors.

Forward is purpose-built for software companies, not merchants, with a playbook we’ve used hundreds of times that’s designed to:

Maximize attach rates regularly achieving 70%+ rates
Unlock economics from both processing and value-added services.
Reduce operational lift by handling compliance, reconciliation, and settlement in a software-native way.

Forward is the platform we wished we’d had, and now it’s here to help software companies capture the payments revenue that’s moving away from traditional processors and forward into platforms.

The future of payments isn’t about being a processor. It’s about being a platform. And the shift is already underway.