Leaders In Payments

Legacy payments platforms do not usually fail with a dramatic outage. They fail by slowing every change request, inflating every integration, and turning “simple” upgrades like ISO 20022 into a stress test. Greg Myers sits down with Vijay Oddiraju, CEO and Co-founder of Volante Technologies, to talk about what banks are learning as real-time payments expand and modernization becomes unavoidable.
We dig into how Volante started with a focus on automating financial data exchange, then found its center of gravity in payments. Vijay shares the moment that accelerated their payments journey: helping enable a record-setting real-time payments milestone in the US. From there, we unpack the biggest customer challenges today, including legacy constraints, time-to-market pressure, performance demands, and the need for resilience as regulations and rails keep changing.
Vijay also lays out where he sees the growth opportunities next: ACH replacement projects, multi-rail payment platforms that can orchestrate across RTP, ACH, wires, and emerging options like stablecoin, plus cloud-native architecture that supports modular microservices and even multi-cloud disaster recovery. We close with a practical lens on AI in payments, especially for exception handling and operations, and the decision criteria that matter when choosing a payments vendor you can trust for the long haul.

Payments can be your second or third biggest cost line and one of your biggest levers for growth, yet most companies still treat payment performance like an afterthought until revenue dips. Greg Myers sits down with Klas Back,, CEO and Co-founder of Pagos, to unpack why enterprises keep “leaving money on the table” through avoidable declines, misconfigured vendors, outdated card network programs, and fragmented reporting that hides what is really happening.

We get practical about what payment optimization looks like when you operate globally: approval rates, authentication friction, dispute and chargeback signals, and the compounding impact of a bad first purchase experience. Klas explains why the hard part is often not strategy, it’s payment data. When information lives in silos across PSPs, acquirers, orchestration, fraud tools, and 3D Secure providers, teams spend weeks normalizing spreadsheets before they can even diagnose a problem. Pagos approaches this as a payments data platform, focused on aggregation, normalization, monitoring, and surfacing opportunities teams can act on.

From there, we dig into how AI changes payment operations. Klas shares how automation can shrink the manual workload, improve detection, and apply a huge knowledge base from card networks like Visa and Mastercard to real merchant data. We also explore emerging forces like agentic fraud and agentic commerce, plus why benchmarking and “time to detection” should be core KPIs for modern payments teams.

If you care about enterprise payments, payment analytics, and building a smarter payments stack with fewer resources, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a payments leader, and leave a review so more teams can find it.

Embedded finance is booming, but most platforms miss the point: customers do not want more financial products, they want fewer steps. We sit down with Marni Mullikin, Director of Platform Growth at Maverick Payments, to unpack how vertical SaaS companies can embed payments in a way that actually improves workflow, increases engagement, and creates durable revenue.

We dig into why embedded payments is usually the smartest first move, from faster revenue collection and better cash flow to the long-term upside of deeper platform usage and better data. Marni walks through the strategy questions teams should answer before they ever pick a provider, including what success looks like, which ownership model fits, and how to align leadership, product, sales, and customer success so launch does not stall.

We also get specific about what software companies should own (the customer relationship, brand, and product experience) versus what a payments partner should take on (underwriting, compliance, risk management, and regulatory complexity). That conversation matters even more when supporting higher risk merchants like CBD or hemp, smoke shops, firearms, gaming, and certain government payment flows with large ticket sizes. We close with the practical reality that go live is only step one, and adoption is where the real value shows up, driven by simple onboarding and messaging that sells outcomes, not features.

If you’re building embedded payments, embedded finance, or a payments-led growth strategy for vertical SaaS, subscribe, share this with a builder on your team, and leave a review so more operators can find the show.

Waiting three to five days for funds isn’t just annoying, it quietly reshapes entire business models. I sit down with Arpit Goel, CEO of Root, to unpack why money movement in the United States still depends on slow, multi-hop workflows and how that slowness creates “float” across payroll, staffing, marketplaces, insurance, and the creator economy. When settlement is delayed, someone benefits, and Arpit makes a sharp case that incentives are the real blocker, not the lack of technology.

We dig into what Root is building in the instant payments space: a non-custodial, bank-to-bank infrastructure layer that aims to deliver true real-time payments where funds settle in seconds and can be used immediately. Arpit explains the “Zelle for businesses” idea, why it matters for enterprise disbursements, and how programmatic treasury APIs can help companies ship faster without spending a year integrating directly with a bank. We also talk about the current US real-time rails, including FedNow and RTP, and why adoption is accelerating as standards and competition push the ecosystem forward.

Then we zoom out to the trends payments leaders can’t ignore: agentic payments, fraud and liability, strong customer authentication, and the stablecoin-to-bank convergence as regulation catches up. Arpit’s final message is direct: compliance is a follower, and security needs to be years ahead as AI-driven attacks scale faster than humans ever could. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a payments leader, and leave a review so more builders can find it.

This episode is part of our Embedded Finance Podcast Series, exploring the strategies, opportunities and challenges shaping the future of embedded finance. The series is leading up to Embedify ’26, the Embedded Finance Summit for vertical SaaS leaders, taking place October 13 in Lehi, Utah. To learn more visit embedify2026.com. 

In this episode I sat down with Conn Byrne, Executive Director of Integrated Payments at Payroc, to get practical about what embedded payments and embedded finance really mean for vertical SaaS leaders who want to scale without burning engineering time.

We dig into Conn’s three-part framework for making embedded finance work in the real world: the cardholder and merchant experience (where retention is won or lost), the developer experience (how fast your team can integrate and customize), and the partnership experience (what happens after launch when something breaks, priorities shift, or you need roadmap clarity). Along the way, we talk about what’s driving demand right now, from private equity expectations to the explosion of AI-built software platforms that can enter a vertical overnight.

We also map the natural product path after embedded payments: lending built on payment data, banking capabilities that improve funding speed and reduce fees, and add-ons like payroll that can turn your platform into a true operating system for your customers. If you’re evaluating an integrated payments partner, planning a migration, or trying to decide how far to go beyond payments, this conversation gives you a grounded checklist and a longer-term view.

And a special thanks to Payroc for being a supporting sponsor at the summit this year.