How SaaS platforms become fintechs: Learnings from Klipboard, The Access Group, and Epos Now

For Klipboard, that moment came when they realised their 50k customers were getting the wrong payment experience. Various payment providers offered the same solution to a hairdresser as to a restaurant, despite having different needs. 

With significant in revenue flowing through their software, Klipboard saw the opportunity to own the payment experience. With a deep understanding of their customers, they could deliver a much more tailored service. But, as the team found, you can’t rely on early assumptions. Here are some critical early lessons from Klipboard:

• Talk to customers often: Challenge initial assumptions by holding regular check-ins with customers to uncover their actual pain points.

• Bring in payments expertise early: Klipboard quickly realised that trying to learn everything in-house would be a mistake. CFO Mike Jeffries recommends hiring payments experts from the get-go to avoid early errors and ensure you’re set up for success.

• Choose the right technology partners: With the right approach, you won’t have to take on the whole project alone. Partnering with a financial technology provider gets you all the benefits without the complexities. 

Desired outcome: High customer uptake

Klipboard launched embedded payments in 2024, unlocking a wave of demand. Many customers responded with the same line: “Why didn’t you do this sooner?”

To learn how Adyen can support your fintech journey, get in touch.

The second stage of the journey is when payments go from “something we should do” into a strategic growth engine. This is when you begin to refine your processes with clear, documented, repeatable workflows and cross-functional collaboration.

The Access Group, a software company serving over 160k businesses, is deep in this phase. As Group Strategic Payments Director Sean Ashton explained, embedded payments require multidisciplinary capability:

“People who don’t understand payments can oversimplify; people who do understand can complicate it. You need balance.”

Here’s what professionalisation looks like according to The Access Group:

• Build internal capability across departments: Payments touches pricing, credit risk, compliance, reconciliation, customer support, and multi-site reporting. Instead of a single team, it requires coordination across the business.

• Start with the customer and work backwards: The real work begins by understanding your customers’ workflows. Where do payments happen? Where does friction slow them down? It’s easy to get excited about the commercial upside of a new feature. But that doesn’t mean customers want (or need) it.

• Set realistic expectations: You’re not just integrating a payment API. You’re building an operational machine that handles refunds, chargebacks, settlement discrepancies, reconciliation, payout timing, and reporting. Sean’s advice is simple: “Multiply what you think you’ll need by five.”

• Make the value so strong it becomes the default: As Sean put it, “Customers should have to explain why they wouldn’t use it.” Rather than pushing payments onto customers, the goal is a world where the embedded payment option is so seamless and beneficial that opting out requires justification.

Desired outcome: Payments becomes a growth-driver 

The Access Group is now turning payments into an embedded, multi-product engine that supports critical workflows for its customers.

The next stage of the journey is when you evolve into a full-blown fintech, expanding from payments into products like capital, business bank accounts, cards, and cash flow tools. 

Similar to Klipboard and The Access Group, Epos Now’s success is guided by the principle “innovation with purpose.” A product only enters the roadmap if it solves a meaningful customer problem.

Here’s a breakdown of Epos Now’s embedded finance evolution to date:

• Embedded payments: At the start of its journey, Epos Now operated a payment referral model. Customers onboarded separately with a PSP and Epos Now had no influence over the downstream payment experience. This included cost, service quality, or the ability to innovate. Taking ownership of the entire ecosystem was necessary. 

• Capital: Once payments were embedded, Epos Now had the visibility and infrastructure to address a deeper problem: cash flow. For the majority of its customers, working capital could be a lifeline. It offers quick access to funding, repayments linked to revenue, a bridge over slow seasons, and the ability to invest when opportunities arise. As COO Richard Nolan said, it gives SMBs the “headroom to keep trading.”

• Business accounts and debit cards: Once Capital scaled, Epos Now uncovered a surprising insight: Many SMBs couldn’t start the onboarding journey because they didn’t have a business bank account. By launching card issuing, they turned a multi-day, multi-provider process into a single onboarding flow. As Richard explained, “Imagine onboarding a merchant, finishing KYC, then telling them to go find a bank. Now imagine not having to do that.”

• Build the ecosystem: By this stage, Epos Now went from a POS company into a full-suite fintech platform. And the team had developed a clear hierarchy:

  • POS: The operational heart of the business.

  • Acquiring: Controlling the payment flow unlocks the rest of the journey.

  • Embedded finance: The toolkit that solves real SMB challenges like working capital, accounts, payouts, financial admin, and onboarding friction.

Desired outcome: A full-service offering that scales with your customers

Epos Now operates a full-suite fintech model supporting SMBs globally. 

One customer story shows the impact. What started as a 10-person bar now spans five floors, scaling with Epos Now’s POS, acquiring, capital, and app ecosystem. As Richard put it: “Epos Now has enabled him to realise his dreams."

Adyen gives you the full stack to build your own fintech, without the overhead of stitching together multiple vendors or becoming a regulated institution yourself. 

Along with the platforms mentioned in this article, we’ve partnered with the likes of Toast, Lightspeed, Wix, Fresha, and Zenoti to help them create a financial ecosystem that better serves their customers. Here’s what you can expect by working with us.

Get infinite outcomes with one platform and integration

With a single integration to Adyen, you’ll be able to:

• Support payments online, in-person, and in-app worldwide, with access to over 200 payment methods.

• Provide business bank accounts* that let your SMBs get paid, hold funds, and operate without relying on external banks.

• Issue physical or virtual cards* tied directly to your platform experience.

• Offer capital** based on data-driven financing models that match repayment to your customers’ revenue cycles.

• Manage payouts, treasury, and settlement tools on the same ledger.

*accounts and card issuing are available in Europe, the UK and US only. **capital is available in Australia, Europe, the UK and US only.

All this is delivered through one platform, built from the ground up by Adyen. No acquisitions, no patchwork architecture, just one coherent system that scales with you.

Retain complete control over your customer experience 

With Adyen, your financial services feel like your product, not an add-on. It’s your UI, your workflows, your customer support. Your customer remains yours; we’re just a silent partner in the background, letting you power the best possible experiences for them. For example, you can: 

• Improve merchant onboarding: Remove friction with real-time verification, automated KYC, and onboarding flows optimized for conversion. 

• Simplify reconciliation and reporting: Because pay-ins, payouts, accounts, and issuing all sit on the same platform, you avoid the complexity of reconciling across vendors, ledgers, and file formats. This means one source of truth, not 10.

• Plug into a ready-made infrastructure: You don’t need to build our own banking infrastructure or complex settlement flows, or manage compliance across markets. Instead, you simply plug into our payment, regulatory, and licensing infrastructure, which does all this for you. 

• Unlock new revenue streams: Every fintech capability becomes an engine for monetization. Bundle payments into your core software costs, benefit from lending margins, and earn on every issued card transaction.

Build fintech at your own pace

Wherever you are in your fintech journey, Adyen helps you move with speed and confidence, without cutting corners.

• Getting started? Launch embedded payments fast, with fraud prevention, compliance, and reporting built in from the start.

• Scaling up? Turn payments into a strategic capability with flexible pricing, operational resilience, and support across regions.

• Going full suite? Add accounts, issuing, capital, and payouts from the same unified stack, without adding complexity.

Adyen gives you the foundation to build the fintech your customers can rely on.

If you’re ready to explore how we can support your fintech journey, get in touch with our team.