Adding payments to your app is easy. Keeping up as you grow is not

Adding payments to your app is the easy part. A new PYMNTS report says the hard part comes after it works. As sales grow, so do fraud risks, compliance duties and day-to-day work. Businesses that plan for that early can keep growing. Those that do not may have to rebuild how they take payments.

What embedded payments are

Embedded payments means letting customers pay inside a product they already use, instead of sending them elsewhere. Companies do it to cut friction, shorten sales cycles, keep customers longer or earn new revenue. It is common. Finextra research found 99% of surveyed companies already offer some form of embedded finance, most often payments and banking.

The complexity cliff

Alex Johnson, founder of Fintech Takes, calls the problem a "complexity cliff." Work piles up slowly and almost unnoticed while results keep looking good. Then it feels like a wall. The way the business ran payments up to that point no longer works at a larger size.

Several things build up at once:

• Entering new markets or adding payment methods brings new rules and new dependencies.
• Fraud monitoring needs more attention.
• Chargebacks, which are disputed payments, need more handling.
• Paying money out to others becomes a bigger job.

The report points to a co-brand card as an example. Launching it can be a defined engineering project. Running it creates ongoing duties around customer service, risk and operations. An integration turns into a lasting business responsibility.

How common the trouble is

Industry research found 93% of companies face challenges offering embedded finance. The problems named include transparency and flexibility, technical integration, compliance and security, and strategic alignment. The report also notes that easy-to-connect software tools do not by themselves create a payment operation that can scale. Each new payment method, currency or country adds its own risk and compliance needs.

What to do before growth arrives

The report's advice is to prepare before volume rises. Eric Frankovic, president of Corporate Payments at WEX, told PYMNTS Intelligence that companies should decide what role payments play in their wider strategy before choosing how to build. The report also says businesses must decide which payment duties they will own and which a provider will handle.

It favors flexible, standardized systems that let a company add a new payment method or market without building a custom connection each time. It also stresses choosing a provider that can support growth, not just launch. The report discusses the payments company REPAY as an example of pairing infrastructure with partnership.