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

As with every business or product development journey, it begins with a customer gap.

For Klipboard, that moment came when they realised their 50k customers were being offered the wrong kind of payment experience. They were being serviced by various payment providers who offered the same solution to a hairdresser as to a restaurant.

With £200bn in revenue flowing through their software, Klipboard saw the opportunity of owning the payment experience. With a deep understanding of their customers' specific needs, they could deliver a much more tailored service. But, as the team found, you can’t always rely on your early assumptions. 

Here are some critical early lessons from Klipboard:

• Talk to customers relentlessly: Challenge initial assumptions by having 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?”

The second stage of the journey is when payments evolve 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 teams to efficiently scale your offering.

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 orchestration across the business.

• Start with the customer and work backwards: The real work begins by understanding your customers’ workflows: where payments happen, where friction lives, and how the software can remove it. It’s easy to get excited about the commercial upside of a new feature. But that doesn’t mean customers want (or need) it.

• Bring in technical experts when scoping payments: You’re not just integrating a payment API. You’re creating an operational machine that handles refunds, chargebacks, settlement discrepancies, reconciliation, payout timing, and reporting. Sean suggests “multiplying what you think you’ll need by five.”

• Make the value so strong it becomes a 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 powers critical workflows for its customers.

The next stage is when you evolve into a full-blown fintech, expanding from payments into products like capital, business bank accounts, cards, and cash flow tools. Epos Now is a leading example. Originally a POS hardware and software provider, Epos Now has expanded into embedded finance across 12 markets.

Similar to Klipboard and The Access Group, its success has hinged on the principle of “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 their 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 their 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 with 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 powering SMBs globally. One customer story illustrates the impact. What began 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. 

As well as the platforms cited in this article, we’ve partnered with the likes of Toast, Lightspeed, Fresha, Wix, and Zenoti to help them create a financial ecosystem that better serves their customers. 

Here’s what you can expect by partnering with us to build your fintech.

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.

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 optimised 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 source of truth, not 10.

• Plug into a ready-made infrastructure: You don’t need to build your 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 monetisation. Bundle payments into your core software costs, benefit from lending margins, and earn on every issued card transaction.

Move faster from day-one

Wherever you are in your journey, we can help you achieve your goals faster. 

• Starting out? Launch embedded payments quickly with the right fraud, compliance, and reporting tools from the start.

• Scaling? Build a strategic payments capability with sophisticated pricing, operational resilience, and multi-region support.

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

Adyen provides the foundation so you can become the fintech your customers rely on.

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