The New Era of Embedded Payments

While we were in Miami for the first Fintech Nerdcon, our Co-Founder Brandon Lloyd joined Dan Rosen from Commerce Ventures on Commerce Conversations to talk about why we started Forward and where embedded payments is really headed.

In the episode, we got into:

• Brandon’s path from building software in college to spending 20 years starting and scaling companies with payments at the core.
• Why we built Forward as a “pay it forward” to the 20,000+ vertical software platforms that want Stripe level payments programs but do not have a team of 100 to build it.
• How those platforms can move from sub-20% payments attach rates to 50–70 percent and turn payments into a revenue stream that rivals their software ARR.
• Why we believe embedded payments will reach ~60 percent of US payment flows and why “wait until Tuesday for Friday’s batch” settlement will be unacceptable in a few years.
• The difference between real, AI-powered payments and the hype around “agentic commerce,” plus where AI is already giving us 10x efficiency in risk, underwriting, and operations.

We also swapped a few founder war stories, including the time a live-events outage at a Major League Baseball stadium almost sank a prior company and what it taught us about leadership and perseverance.

Big thank you to Dan and the Commerce Ventures team for having us, to Nerdcon for creating such an energizing environment for builders, and to Galileo for the on-site studio.

🎧 Give it a listen and tell me what you think!