A buyer's checklist for choosing an embedded payments partner

Every embedded payments demo looks good. The checkout works, the dashboard is clean, and the sales engineer has an answer for everything you throw at them. The trouble shows up eighteen months later, when your support team is fielding chargeback questions nobody scoped and your finance lead is trying to work out why the revenue line doesn't match the pitch deck.

If you're a product or finance leader comparing PayFac-as-a-Service providers, the demo won't tell you much. The questions you ask will. Here are the ones we'd want answered.

Who owns underwriting and compliance?

Start here, because it decides how much of the work lands on your team. Ask who underwrites merchants, who carries the compliance obligations, and who deals with the card networks when something goes sideways. A managed model should take most of that off your plate. A referral model or a thin wrapper may leave you holding more than you expected.

Get the answer in writing and ask what stays with you no matter what. Some obligations never leave the platform, and it's better to learn that now.

How fast can a merchant actually get live?

Onboarding speed is a retention lever, not a nice-to-have. A merchant who waits weeks to take a first payment is a merchant who starts wondering whether your software was the right call.

Ask what onboarding looks like inside your signup flow versus a handoff to a separate application. Ask what happens when a merchant needs a manual review, and who talks to them while it's pending. Skip the averages in the brochure and ask to see the actual path a new merchant takes.

What does the revenue share really look like?

This is the question that turns payments from a cost into a line on your P&L. Ask who sets merchant pricing, how the share is structured, and whether you can change pricing by segment. Then ask what happens to your share as volume grows, because a deal that looks fine at launch can look very different at scale.

If a provider is vague here, treat that as an answer.

Where do they actually operate?

Coverage claims are easy to make and harder to check. If your merchants sell across borders, or you expect them to, ask which markets are supported, which currencies settle natively, and how reporting handles more than one currency. ValPay supports 40+ markets across CAD, USD, EUR, AUD and GBP, and we'd suggest holding every provider to the same specificity.

What are the uptime and security guarantees?

Two things matter most. Ask for the provider's PCI-DSS level and what that does to your own scope. Then ask for the uptime commitment, how it's measured and what it covers. ValPay is PCI-DSS Level 1, which means less certification weight on your side. Whoever you choose, ask what happens when the commitment is missed, who tells your merchants, and what the escalation path looks like at 2am on a Saturday.

Who handles disputes and reporting?

Chargebacks are a support cost that arrives quietly. Ask who manages disputes end to end, what your team sees, and what they have to do. Then look at reporting. Can your finance team reconcile from inside the product, or are they exporting spreadsheets? The unglamorous parts are usually what decide whether finance signs off.

Can you leave?

Ask about merchant portability, data access and term length before you're happy with the relationship, not after. A good partner won't mind the question.

A quick way to use this

Print the list and score each provider yourself, two or three sentences per question. Your notes will tell you more than any vendor's scorecard. Ours is built around four ideas, Accept, Secure, Manage and Grow, and we'd be glad to be measured against this list.

Once you've chosen, the harder work starts: deciding where payments belongs in your product. We wrote a companion guide for that, Payments in the product: a design guide to embedding checkout, onboarding and reporting. Download it there.