Payments are invisible infrastructure. That’s the point.
When embedded payments work well, merchants don’t think about the technology underneath. They just get paid, manage their accounts, and move on.
But payments aren’t entirely silent. There are moments in every merchant’s lifecycle that require communication: an application needs a document, a payout is on hold, a transaction is under review. What happens in those moments matters. The speed of the message, the clarity of the ask, and critically, who it appears to come from all shapes whether a merchant responds, completes onboarding, and stays active.
CommsHub is Forward’s answer to that challenge: an automated, event-driven communications platform that sends the right message at the right time, fully branded as the software partner the merchant already knows and trusts.
The Manual Reality
Before CommsHub, every merchant communication required hands-on ops work. An abandoned application meant opening Freshdesk, finding the merchant, customizing a template, sending it, logging it, and setting a manual follow-up reminder. A payout hold that needed immediate notification might not get communicated for an entire day, at which point the merchant had already called support twice. Document requests took 15 minutes each. Multiply that by 60 per month.
At scale, this hits a ceiling. Communication becomes an afterthought instead of infrastructure, and the merchant experience pays the price.
CommsHub changes this.
How CommsHub Works: Application Recovery
A gym owner opens a payments application, fills out the first page, gets interrupted, and never comes back. Without CommsHub, that application sits until someone notices it in a manual dashboard review, if they notice at all.
With CommsHub, a software platform branded email lands the next morning: “Ready to finish your payments account?” A follow-up comes Friday. A final nudge on Monday. If the gym owner logs back in between reminders, the sequence pauses automatically. If they complete the application, it stops entirely.
Partners using CommsHub recover 20%+ percent of abandoned applications
Why Merchant Communication Infrastructure Matters Now
Five years ago, embedded payments were a differentiator. Today they’re table stakes. The competitive advantage has shifted from having payments to how well they work, and that includes the moments when something requires a merchant’s attention.
A merchant who doesn’t hear a follow-up doesn’t activate. One who waits two days to learn about a payout hold loses trust. These aren’t edge cases; they’re the everyday moments that determine whether a payments program succeeds at scale. The platforms that win make the experience invisible when everything works and crystal clear when it doesn’t. CommsHub is how Forward does both.
White-Labeled by Design
Forward’s partner companies are software platforms. Their merchants, such as eye doctors, gym owners, field service businesses, all have a relationship with that software. They don’t have a relationship with Forward. The payments infrastructure is supposed to be invisible.
CommsHub keeps it that way. Every communication that goes out through the platform is branded as the partner, not as Forward. When a merchant gets a document request or an application reminder, it looks and feels like it came from the software they use every day. No confusion about the sender and no friction at the moment that requires action.
For software platforms, this matters more than it might seem. Merchant trust is the foundation of payments adoption. A communication that arrives from an unfamiliar name introduces doubt at exactly the wrong moment. CommsHub eliminates that.
Event-Driven, Not Manual
The architecture behind CommsHub is event-based: something happens in a merchant’s payments lifecycle, and the right communication goes out automatically within minutes.
An application is started but not completed. CommsHub sends a branded reminder at day two, day five, and day seven, with smart suppression that pauses the sequence if the merchant becomes active in the interim. A document request goes out in under two minutes. A payout notification reaches the merchant the moment a hold is placed, with clear next steps included.
Forward’s ops team can build and deploy new communication templates without engineering support, which means the platform scales as new use cases emerge. The current rollout covers 20 to 40 templates spanning the full merchant lifecycle: onboarding and application nudging, document collection, transaction monitoring, payout issues, bank linking, and dispute management.
The Business Case for Better Merchant Communications
Payments adoption is the variable that moves the needle most in an embedded payments program. It’s not spread, and it’s not take rate, it’s how many of a software platform’s customers actually activate and stay active on payments.
Merchant communications are a direct lever on that number. An application that stalls because a follow-up didn’t arrive on time is a merchant who never fully activates. A hold that takes days to communicate is a merchant who calls support, gets frustrated, and may disengage. CommsHub compresses those timelines: resolution that previously took days or weeks now happens in minutes to hours, because the trigger and the communication are connected automatically.
For software platforms, the downstream effect is measurable: fewer support escalations, faster merchant activation, and higher sustained adoption across the customer base.
Payments That Work Quietly and Communicate Clearly When It Counts
The best embedded payments infrastructure is the kind merchants don’t have to think about. CommsHub extends that principle to the moments when communication is unavoidable. When something happens that requires a merchant’s attention, they hear about it immediately, clearly, and from a sender they already trust.
That’s what a great payments experience looks like end to end.
