A friend of mine, an investor, said something offhand recently that stuck with me.
“There are not enough VPs of Payments in the world to meet the demand.”
He’s right, and it got me thinking about why.
The supply/demand imbalance is real, so what does a great VP of Payments actually do for a software company and why do we need more of them?
They set and execute a real strategy
Payments is one of those spaces where there are a million things you could do, and most of them won’t move the needle on what actually matters. A strong VP of Payments starts with the goal: what does the business need payments to deliver, and by when? Then they work backward to pick the right levers.
Here’s a counterexample I love: Let’s accept Bitcoin.
It sounds exciting, it might grab a headline, but it won’t get you to 50% of revenue coming from payments and embedded finance. A VP of Payments knows the difference between a distraction and a driver.
They make attach rate priority one
Most software companies have thousands of customers. A few hundred of them are using the platform’s payment product. The rest? They’re still on the local bank, QuickBooks Payments, or whatever processor signed them up a decade ago.
The VP of Payments is laser-focused on changing that math, resourcing the effort internally or through partners to push attach rate above 75%. Everything else is secondary until this is solved.
They optimize pricing to hit take rate goals
Once attach rate is moving in the right direction, pricing becomes a meaningful lever. Flat rate, interchange-plus, surcharging, payout timing, card-type premiums, payments can be priced in many ways, and the right structure depends on the customer base and the business model. A VP of Payments knows how to tune this to grow payments income quarter over quarter without burning customer relationships.
They optimize transaction expenses
Maximizing revenue is step one. Protecting margin is step two. The largest cost in payments is interchange, typically around 67% of the transaction. A VP of Payments knows how to work with card network programs, send richer transaction data, and leverage network tokens to compress that cost and widen the spread.
They support enterprise sales and migrations
Large customers and groups of customers like franchisors need more than a self-serve onboarding flow. A VP of Payments rolls up their sleeves on these deals: analyzing the customer’s current payments expense, modeling the savings opportunity, and managing the migration end-to-end, including token conversions to make the transition clean.
They coordinate across departments
Payments can’t be optimized in a silo. A small product change can have an outsized impact on attach rate or wallet share. The VP of Payments is constantly identifying those opportunities by working closely with product, engineering, and sales to co-design features that grow volume and deepen the platform’s share of their customers’ payment activity.
They present to the board
When payments represent 50% of a company’s revenue, it earns a dedicated board-level conversation. The VP of Payments distills a complex, multi-variable business into clear KPIs, tracks progress, and comes in with a point of view on what would accelerate the business. This is a skill in itself.
They design what’s next
Once the payments program is mature and optimized, the best VPs of Payments start looking around the corner. If you’re underwriting customers and moving money to them every banking day, what else becomes possible? Working capital. Insurance. B2B payments. The VP of Payments builds the roadmap for the embedded financial products that can be layered on top.
So why aren’t there enough of them?
Embedded payments isn’t new, but the vast majority of software companies are still operating at 20% of their potential. The playbook exists. The opportunity is enormous. What’s missing is the people who’ve actually run it before.
That’s the supply/demand problem in a sentence. The role demands a rare combination of strategic thinking, financial fluency, cross-functional influence, and operational depth. And it takes time to develop that experience, you can’t manufacture it on a timeline that matches how quickly software companies are waking up to what payments can do for their business.
If you’re a software founder thinking about payments, understanding this role and whether you need to hire for it, outsource parts of it, or find a partner who can fill the gaps is one of the more important decisions you’ll make.
We built Forward to be that partner for the companies who aren’t ready to hire a full payments organization yet. But that’s a topic for another post.
