If you’re a SaaS company, you often charge monthly, usually via card.
Or you sell software or a B2B platform that enables your clients to collect payments from third parties—either end consumers or other businesses—quickly and frictionlessly.
In both cases, there’s something in common: payments and transaction flows sit at the heart of the business model, yet they are rarely treated as a strategic lever. Accumulated fees, processes that don’t scale, frictions that cost money for both the company and its clients.
But what if that same transactional layer could become an opportunity? Not just to collect payments more efficiently, but to facilitate operations, enhance the user experience, and support the client’s business growth. In certain platform models, this layer can even become a material revenue stream—in some cases accounting for 15–20% of total revenue, or even more.
It won’t apply to every company, but it is, at the very least, something worth considering during product design.
Finance: the industry’s ugly duckling
Finance is often the overlooked part of any business. It seems to always deliver bad news, and it rarely gets attention when new products are launched.
A market that sustains everything else
One sector that will never disappear is payments. Every day, millions of transactions occur through various payment methods—and let’s be honest, any business relies on someone being willing to use the product and, therefore, pay for it.
In recent years, the market has grown dramatically: the global value of digital transactions rose from around $4 trillion in 2015 to over $20 trillion in 2025.
The digital economy has opened a vast, largely untapped market for any new entrepreneurial project. In investor decks, tremendous effort is made to show that: there is market demand for the product, it solves a specific problem, it leads (to some extent) its sector, and it is usable across different industries… yet I have never seen a deck explain that collecting payments is easy, fast, and—most importantly—cost-effective for the company.
When getting paid efficiently stops being a minor detail
Let’s focus on that last word: cost-effective. This is one area where any B2B finance team can really shine.
A few years ago, “remote” payment methods, as defined by law, fell into two categories: bank transfers, leaving the initiative to the buyer, and direct debit—a slow method that allowed banks to finance themselves for days while managing potential returns, and required lengthy information requests and reactive payment tracking.
The rise of digital payment methods, coupled with the global adoption of credit cards, has created a landscape where commerce can choose from many solutions at increasingly competitive prices. In this context, Visa processed $1.7 trillion in commercial payments in 2024, while Mastercard’s B2B business reached around $1.8 trillion.
The European Union, through two already implemented payment directives and a third on the verge of approval, has democratized technology that 15 years ago was only accessible to a handful of large corporations that could afford it. This is reflected in sector structure: in 2025, the EUCLID database identified 60 acquirers in France, 33 in Germany, and 24 in Spain, while the volume of acquired transactions in the eurozone grew 80% in number and 60% in value between 2014 and 2024.
The invisible layer that changes everything
The rise of FinTechs, new payment institution licenses, and sector innovation—combined with strict security and regulatory standards—enables automation at low cost, allowing companies to:
If your business has a digital checkout process—and it doesn’t matter if your client is an individual or a corporation—you’re probably thinking of companies like PayPal or Stripe as leaders in efficient, affordable payments. But every payment provider registered with European regulators can give you the same efficiency, often at pricing worth considering.
In the next post, we’ll explore the security standards that European regulations require of operators, and how other international providers are adopting similar measures even before their countries align with Europe’s framework
Por Mariluz Santos, COO at Swanlaab Venture Factory
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