NMI’s New CEO Says AI Will Decide Who Wins in Embedded Payments

Watch more: NMI’s New CEO Says AI Will Decide Who Wins in Embedded Payments

Payments are becoming submerged into everyday life, almost invisible to the end consumer. From ride-hailing apps to software platforms that handle transactions in the background, embedded payments have moved from a trend to a standard expectation.

But making payments seamless on the surface means managing enormous complexity underneath, from onboarding and underwriting to risk management and settlement.

A Fragmented Landscape

The payments ecosystem is fragmented. Independent software vendors (ISVs), independent sales organizations (ISOs), banks and PayFacs all want to integrate payments into their customer experiences. But for these players, turning software into a payments business involves navigating complex trade-offs.

That’s where NMI positions itself, focusing on simplifying and abstracting away those complexities. As Steve Pinado, NMI’s new CEO, noted to Karen Webster in an interview, “We enable efficient payments either embedded in software or through an ISO who has to manage multiple acquirer and multiple different merchant bases. If you think about where we sit, it is really as an enabler across a wide spectrum.”

Pinado described the decision point for those providers to embrace embedded payments as existing along a curve: “There’s a bit of a graph of operational complexity versus how much yield or take rate. Companies have to decide where they want to play,” he told Webster.

This balancing act underscores NMI’s role. Its platform lets partners pick and choose the functions they need, from signup to payout, while NMI manages the “plumbing” of payments infrastructure.

Pinado noted that NMI is uniquely positioned to serve as an intermediary that simplifies the many-to-many complexities between merchants, software providers and financial institutions. “What NMI has built great scale in is being a terrific partner to the providers that … own the customer relationship. We stand in the middle and make that easy for businesses, whether it’s for their unattended solutions or potentially medium-risk solutions,” he said.

This many-to-many functionality, from signup to payout, is core to NMI’s value proposition. Instead of companies stitching together multiple back end providers, NMI acts as a hub that enables flexibility and scale across ISOs, platforms and ISVs.

CEO With B2B Payments Depth

Pinado came to his new role in August having held leadership roles at Billtrust, Constellation Payments, and more recently Radian Capital. His time at Constellation provided an early lesson in the complexity of building payments infrastructure from scratch: “We built a gateway and a terminal application and certified around the world. It was hard work . …I’m not sure I would ever do that again. I would’ve called [NMI] back then if I had thought of it,” he told Webster.

That experience convinced him of the value in flexible, scalable platforms. As he takes over the CEO role, Pinado emphasized listening to customers and leveraging his knowledge of the B2B payments ecosystem. “For the next 60 days, I’m going to see as many customers as I can,” he said.

Looking Ahead

Pinado is clear about NMI’s strategic sweet spot: enabling intermediaries who own customer relationships, rather than competing directly for large merchants.

Looking to the future, Pinado also pointed to artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) role in improving both operations and customer experience. “We will be heavy AI users in every way we can across every function of the business,” he said, adding, “If you’re not taking advantage of it and really, really in a focused way deploying inside your business, it’s a threat.”

Above all, Pinado stressed the importance of software companies being deliberate about how they embed payments. “It’s broadly about being purposeful … understanding where you are in your life, what’s reasonable, if should you take risk and should you handle onboarding. … Picking where you play and why, and allowing that to change as you scale — that’s really important,” he told Webster.