At Transact 2025, the promises were familiar: better tools, faster rails, smarter automation. But on the show floor, where the work of selling and integrating actually happens, something different was taking shape.
Every conversation—whether with a founder, COO, or CPO—pointed to the same shift: merchants aren’t just buying tech. They’re buying what fits.
Integration is No Longer a Bonus
For companies serving B2B merchants, the focus is shifting from price to process. Natalie Luneva, COO of DepositFix, described how the payments conversation has matured. It’s no longer about negotiating a few basis points off a transaction fee. Instead, merchants are bogged down by quoting, invoicing, and reconciliation—manual, admin-heavy work that drains resources every month.
Rather than bolting payments onto the end of a sales flow, the direction is now clear: embed it into the business systems where those actions are already happening. CRMs and ERPs are where the complexity lives, and that’s where the value gets unlocked.
This signals a deeper product expectation: if it doesn’t map to real workflows, it doesn’t belong.
Packaging is the New Distribution
Across partners and platform enablers, there’s growing frustration with how disjointed the ecosystem feels. Tonida Vaka, Co-Founder & CEO at TapifyGo, works with ISOs and ISVs trying to sell value-added tools—loyalty, fraud prevention, receipt tech—but most merchants don’t see the plumbing behind those services. They just want it to work.
What’s really being sold now isn’t the service itself, but the integration and support behind it. TapifyGo’s model centers on bundling multiple tools into unified offers that are easier to understand, sell, and deploy. It’s a response to the growing realization that fragmented tooling, even if powerful, creates drag on distribution.
Packaging isn’t a go-to-market afterthought. It’s becoming the core value proposition.
Fit is the Real Differentiator
Larger players in embedded finance are responding to the same pressure. Nima Montazeri, Chief Product Officer at Liberis, described how the market has moved beyond listing features or services. What matters is how seamlessly those services plug into existing environments.
For embedded capital products, this means surfacing the right offer at the right time—without requiring the merchant to go looking for it. It’s about anticipating the need and responding contextually within the partner interface. The product is invisible until it’s useful—and then it’s immediate.
This shift toward native integration isn’t just tactical. It’s become the benchmark for what “embedded” really means.
Smart Tech in the Right Places
In vertical SaaS, where operational complexity runs deep, innovation has to be measured. Grey Burnett, CFO at CenterEdge Software, which serves entertainment and activity venues, is investing in automation where it reduces cost and increases consistency—like self-service kiosks and membership-based revenue smoothing. But they’re not chasing AI unless there’s a clear, margin-driven reason to.
This selective adoption speaks to a more grounded view of tech strategy. Innovation isn’t about jumping on trends. It’s about knowing what the customer’s staff can manage—and what will actually move the business forward.
What it All Comes Down To
From payments and lending to hospitality tech and go-to-market orchestration, one message cut across every conversation: tools only matter when they fit.
It’s not the smartest tech or the boldest pitch that wins. It’s the product that respects the merchant’s workflow, the partner’s limitations, and the complexity of real-world use.
What stood out at Transact weren’t the companies trying to sell more. It was the teams building alignment—between product, channel, and end user.
And that’s what people buy.
🌟 Spotlight on Liberis
With their Create Journey API, Liberis enables platforms to offer personalized, pre-approved funding options to their SMB customers—at scale, and with a single integration. They’re already powering embedded lending experiences for partners across e-commerce, accounting, and payments.
“We’re embedding lending where businesses already operate—and using GenAI to do it more intelligently.” – Nima Montazeri, Chief Product Officer, Liberis
— The Unofficially ETA Transact Team
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