Marcus Reed

I started in backend development at a vertical SaaS company serving the property management industry. When the company decided to embed payments — letting landlords collect rent through the platform — I was the engineer assigned to evaluate providers and build the integration.

That first project taught me how different the ISV payments world is from merchant payments. The sales decks all looked the same, but the actual integration experience, revenue economics, and merchant onboarding friction varied wildly between providers. We made a choice that worked, but only after months of research that I had to do mostly from scratch — because nothing like this site existed.

I went on to lead payments integration at a second B2B platform, this time in the professional services space. Different vertical, different transaction patterns, but the same problem: no ISV-specific resource for comparing payment providers on the criteria that actually matter to software companies.

Over those two companies, I oversaw payment flows processing over $40 million annually. I evaluated more than a dozen providers, negotiated partnership terms, and built integrations across embedded payments, PayFac-as-a-Service, and traditional gateway models.

Every ISV making a payments decision goes through the same painful research loop. You Google "[Provider A] vs [Provider B]" and get affiliate blog posts written by people who've never integrated a payment API. You talk to sales reps who all claim their platform is perfect for ISVs. You dig through documentation trying to figure out if "PayFac-as-a-Service" means the same thing across providers (it doesn't).

I built ISV Payment Integration to be the resource I wished existed when I was making these decisions. Every comparison uses the same 13-criterion scoring framework, evaluated from the ISV perspective — not the merchant perspective, not the consumer perspective.

No provider has paid for placement or higher scores. No affiliate links. The analysis is based on publicly available documentation, API references, pricing pages, and what I've learned from years of working with these platforms directly.

I don't believe in declaring universal winners. The right payment platform for a proptech ISV processing $500K/month is different from the right platform for a restaurant SaaS doing $50M/month. Context matters more than aggregate scores.

That said, every comparison needs a consistent framework to be useful. Each provider is scored across 13 criteria that cover the full decision surface: from integration architecture and API quality to revenue sharing economics and merchant onboarding friction. The full methodology is published and transparent.

Where I have direct experience with a provider's integration, I note it. Where I'm relying on documentation and publicly available information, I'm transparent about that too. The goal is to give you a starting point that's more rigorous than a sales call and more ISV-focused than a generic payments blog.