Fifth Third, Priority and CSI deals put a premium on payments built into software

Payload said it processed nearly $500 million in a single month, May, through technology it has been embedding into other companies' software. On Aug. 19, Fifth Third said it led a strategic investment in the company. That was the second of three transactions in about six weeks that, according to PYMNTS, point the same direction: fintech buyers are paying for payments that already sit inside the software a business runs on, not for processing capacity on its own.

The other two deals came from very different buyers. CSI's acquisition of Qolo in July added another variation, according to PYMNTS: CSI intends to build the Qolo technology into the core banking, digital banking and API products it sells to community banks. Priority Commerce followed on Aug. 26 with an agreement to acquire IntelliPay, which handles payments for state and local governments and utilities.

According to PYMNTS, each target holds an established position inside particular industries and software environments, and the technology is already integrated into customers' operating software.

Three buyers, three ways into the workflow

Payload's footprint, as PYMNTS describes it, spans homebuilding, property management, legal services, franchises and residential real estate. According to Payload, it has been embedding its payments technology into third-party software, which is what makes the May volume figure meaningful: the money flows because the closing, the lease or the franchise fee is already being managed in a platform Payload is connected to. For a bank like Fifth Third, PYMNTS frames the investment as a route to closer access to commercial payment flows.

Priority Commerce's IntelliPay agreement extends its enterprise payments business into a segment it did not previously have, according to PYMNTS: state and local government and utilities. Buying an established provider is a faster way into that segment than building one. The deal is an agreement, not yet a completed acquisition, so the closing date is the next milestone to watch.

CSI's purchase of Qolo is the infrastructure variation. What Qolo brought, PYMNTS reports, was card issuing and processing, multi-rail payment orchestration and a real-time account ledger. CSI plans to fold those capabilities into its core banking, digital banking and API products. The stated goal is to give community banks tools to get more deeply involved in how their commercial customers actually operate, meaning the bank's platform becomes the place where a business moves money rather than a place it reports to afterward.

Taken together, PYMNTS concludes that established vertical positioning is becoming part of the acquisition value proposition in payments, especially when the technology is already integrated into a customer's operating software. That is a judgment about the pattern, not a stated valuation.

The data inside the transaction is part of what is being bought

The clearest published explanation of why that position is worth paying for comes from a PYMNTS Intelligence report released in February, "FinTechs Tap Embedded Payments to Deepen Customer Relationships." Of the 30 fintechs surveyed, 90% offered embedded payments, the most common embedded finance capability. The sample is small, so treat the percentages as directional rather than definitive.

The motives matter more than the adoption rate. In the PYMNTS Intelligence survey, 60% of respondents said they were adding or improving embedded finance to gain better customer data and insights. Competitive differentiation was named by another 60%, and 53% pointed to reaching new customers. Transaction revenue was not the headline reason.

That reframes what an acquirer of Payload, IntelliPay or Qolo is really buying. PYMNTS makes the point that when a payment provider sits inside property software, healthcare software or the commercial platform of a bank, it is not competing for each transaction on its own. The software that runs the business is where the payment starts. The survey does not say how the data generated inside that workflow is governed or shared, which is a question the customer of the acquired vendor now gets to ask.

For the finance director at a property management firm or the clerk running a city's utility billing, the practical consequence is that the entity holding payment data may change hands without the software front end changing at all. Anyone with a vertical software contract signed in the last few years would do well to read the payments and data clauses again, because the counterparty on those clauses is exactly what is being acquired.

Software is taking a bigger share of small-business payment revenue

The summer deals sit on top of a shift BCG measured a year earlier. In a September 2025 article, the firm reported that more than half of relevant independent software vendors in North America offered embedded payments in 2025, and that adoption of vertical software among US small and midsize businesses reached 59% in 2024, up from 50% two years earlier.

BCG also put a revenue number on it: SaaS providers offering integrated payments accounted for 36% of small and midsize business acquiring revenue in 2024, and the firm expects that share to reach 45% by 2028. If that projection holds, a growing share of merchant payment revenue sits with software companies rather than standalone processors, which goes some way to explaining why processors like Priority are buying their way into vertical software positions now.

The broader embedded finance opportunity is larger and mostly untouched, in BCG's estimate. The firm sizes the total addressable market across payments, capital, accounts and card issuing in North America and Europe at about $185 billion, against current penetration of roughly $32 billion, and says more than 80% of the market remains in play. BCG is candid that the nonpayments products are proving harder to deliver than payments were, because small businesses' relationships with their banks are stickier than their relationships with software vendors and because lending is harder to underwrite than a card transaction.

That difficulty is arguably what the CSI-Qolo deal is designed to solve from the other side. Instead of a software company trying to displace a bank, a bank technology provider is adding ledger and issuing capability so the community bank can be the one embedded in the customer's operations. For a community bank CIO evaluating core platforms this year, the question BCG's numbers raise is whether the core vendor can put the bank inside a commercial customer's daily workflow, or only behind it.

Banks are building, not just buying

The acquisition route is not the only one. PYMNTS reported on Sept. 3 that FIS launched an embedded banking platform aimed at banks, and separately that bank earnings results showed institutions want different mixes of deposits, fee income and assets from embedded finance partnerships. Both items suggest banks are treating embedded finance as a line of business to design deliberately rather than a channel to fall into.

That leaves a real choice for mid-sized banks and for the software companies that serve their commercial customers. Back a provider already embedded, as Fifth Third did when it led a strategic investment in Payload, according to PYMNTS, or license a platform and integrate it, as the FIS launch offers. PYMNTS does not report which path is winning, and the summer deals are too few to settle it.

What the three transactions do establish is where the value now sits. A payments company whose technology is already integrated into customers' operating software is being priced on that integration, and buyers from three different corners of financial services reached the same conclusion over a single summer.

The next data point is Priority Commerce closing on IntelliPay. Until then, the operator running a vertical platform with a bundled payments module has a narrow window to find out who will own that module by year-end.