If you’re part of a community bank or credit union, chances are you’re sitting on a goldmine of opportunities to bring embedded payments into the fold. You just haven’t dug deeply enough yet.
These aren’t abstract, Silicon Valley-style ideas. We’re talking real-world use cases for your rural accountholders who are leasing combines, your health care professionals running specialized clinics, and your small businesses still manually handling payments with spreadsheets and strong coffee.
Now let’s break down where to start looking for opportunities, how to think about risk, what technology is involved, and why this stuff isn’t just fancy fintech fluff. It is, rather, a strategic lever tailor-made for the community financial institutions that know their accountholders best.
Start with Obvious Targets: Checks and Batch-Based Payments
Yep, people still write checks, and batch-based payments are still a thing. A clunky thing. Maybe it’s Bob leasing a new tractor for his soybean farm. Maybe it’s Dr. Patel, the local ophthalmologist who owns his practice and pays contractors manually. These business members could benefit big-time from embedded ACH, instant payments (via the RTP® Network or the FedNow® Service), and in some cases wire transfers. By making payments smoother and faster, directly from their own systems or the institution’s digital platform, they save time, reduce errors, and look more professional to their accountholders.
Embedded payment platforms can make this easier by offering secure APIs that connect financial institutions with fintechs and business clients without overhauling your core. Even for lower-volume use cases, simply using payment APIs may make implementation faster while delivering the benefits that come with modern technology, including real-time transactions and reporting, integration with other tools in the ecosystem, and synergy of an overall payment strategy as the world moves rapidly into stablecoins and other forms of digital payments.
Got Niche Business Clients? They’re Ideal for Embedded Payments
Think about the specialists in your portfolio. Dentists, optometrists, outpatient clinics, and more. These folks often have vertical software for patient management but rely on external platforms or even spreadsheets for handling payments. That’s an opportunity for you.
If you can offer embedded payments, such as payment links inside appointment reminders or in-app lending options for elective procedures, you’re not just improving efficiency for the businesses. You’re expanding what it means to bank with you.
Clients with High Volumes of Payments Need Your Help
Let’s talk about inbound payment collection, especially for businesses juggling hundreds or thousands of payments a week. It’s easy for money to hit the account without clear labeling, making reconciliation a messy chore.
Virtual accounts could solve that.
A virtual account is a sub-ledger or alias tied to a real account. Businesses can assign a unique virtual account number to each customer, project, or invoice. When payments come in, the virtual account tells you exactly where that money belongs. No guesswork required.
That’s a fast win for financial institutions and their clients.
What’s Your Risk Tolerance?
Once you’ve mastered the basics, you may want to consider markets requiring a higher risk tolerance. For example, gaming companies that want to emulate the experience of a betting window see greater loyalty when they implement embedded instant payments. Institutions that bank cannabis may also find adding embedding payments to their product offering positions them better with their client base. The bottom line is it might be more effective to start with lower risk use cases and increase your risk appetite as you gain competence, build trust, and build out infrastructure. Risk should never be ignored, but it should be weighed against opportunity. The opportunity to better serve your business members and generate new income is growing fast.
Payment APIs, PaaS, and Core-Integrated Embedded Payments
Jack Henry’s JHA SmartPay Platform™ and the Victor Technologies platform recently acquired by Jack Henry both offer integration paths directly to the core. JHA SmartPay provides a modern merchant portal with guided payments, reporting tools, and remote deposit capabilities. The Victor APIs allow fintechs to connect directly with SilverLake institutions, enabling embedded payments, automated near real-time reconciliation, and virtual accounts with built-in monitoring and onboarding tools. Jack Henry plans to expand Victor's capabilities to serve its Symitar® credit union and Treasury Management platform clients, and integrate directly with the new, cloud-native Jack Henry Platform.
Everything is designed to simplify payment workflows for business clients.
Monetization? Yes, Please
None of this matters if we don’t talk revenue and deposits. Payments are more than just utility. They’re a revenue stream and a path toward deeper client engagement and deposit growth. Once you're embedded in partner platforms, you become central to the solution and sticky as a result.
The best part is you don’t need to reinvent yourself as a fintech. You just need to activate what’s already in your orbit.
There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills
PaaS and APIs are not four-letter words. They’re the building blocks for your institution’s future success. Think of them as a path to resilience in a market where generic products and services are not going to carry community institutions forward. You’ll probably find that path starts with your clients and leverages payments. So get digging!
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