How do you move existing customers onto your embedded payments?

Most platforms discover the gap a quarter after launch. Payments are live, the integration works, the pricing page is up, and the share of customers using it is stuck somewhere under a fifth. The customers who signed up last month are on it. The customers who have been with you for six years are not, and they are the ones with the volume.

That is the difference between launching payments and moving your existing customers: the customers you already have and the payments they take today, wherever those are processed. Launch gets you the new customers. Moving the existing ones gets you the money, because the revenue in payments sits with the customers who already trust you, already pay you a subscription and already run their business inside your product.

Nobody moves an existing customer base by sending one email. A customer with a card machine on a lease, a Direct Debit file at another provider and a bookkeeper who has learned the old reports has a dozen small reasons not to change, and none of them are about your price. The work is removing those reasons, one group at a time.

Every platform that has moved a large share of its existing customers has pulled the same four levers, in roughly the same order. They are not alternatives; each one picks up the customers the previous one left behind.

1. Defaults

Every new customer starts on your payments. The old provider is an option they have to ask for, not a box on the sign-up form. This is the cheapest lever and the one most platforms get wrong, because sales teams keep offering the old route to close a deal faster. Fix the default and the share of your customers on your payments rises every month without a single campaign.

2. Feature gating

Tie the features customers ask for to taking payments through your product. Automatic reconciliation, deposits taken at booking, instant refunds from the order screen, payouts to a seller's own account, card on file for repeat customers: each of these only works cleanly when the payment runs through you. Say so, plainly, inside the product. A customer who wants the feature now has a reason to move that has nothing to do with rate.

3. In-product moments

Ask at the moment changing costs the customer nothing. A new site opening. A renewal. A new card machine arriving because the old lease ended. A failed payment that needs chasing. The first time they open the reconciliation screen and see the gap. These moments already exist in your product's data. The job is to put the right message in front of the right customer when the moment arrives, not three weeks later in a newsletter.

4. Campaigns

Campaigns pick up everyone the first three levers did not reach: the group that renews in a month you cannot predict, the group with no feature pull, the group that has simply never thought about it. They are run to planned groups, in your name, with pricing and a reason worked out for each group before anyone writes an email. Campaigns come last because they are the most expensive lever, and they work far better once the product is already doing the asking.

Platforms that start with a campaign tend to burn their best moment. The email goes to every customer at once, the customers who were ready move, and the ones who were not now have a reason to say no that they will repeat to your account managers for a year. Starting with defaults and gating changes what the campaign is for: it stops being a pitch to everyone and becomes a nudge to a group whose product already tells them why.

There is a second reason. Defaults and gating are visible in your product's numbers within weeks. They tell you which groups move easily, which features pull hardest, and what customers say when they are asked. Campaign copy written after that is written from evidence, not from a positioning document.

Before any lever is pulled, the customers are split into groups. The usual cuts are size, how the customer takes payments today, and what it would cost them to change.

• By size. The top tier, often a small number of customers, can carry a large share of the volume. They get a conversation, not a campaign.
• By rail. Card in person, card online, Direct Debit, invoices paid by bank transfer. A customer collecting by Direct Debit needs mandates moved or re-signed; a customer on a terminal lease needs a date; a customer taking payments online can often switch in an afternoon.
• By cost of change. Contract end dates, hardware, who else in the business has to agree. The group with no contract and no hardware moves first and proves the message.

Each group gets its own reason, moment and channel. That is what turns moving your customers from one big push into a sequence of small, predictable ones.

The figures below are examples chosen to show the arithmetic. They are not a forecast and not a client's numbers.

Suppose a platform has 1,000 customers who together put £240m a year through or beside its product, and 12% of them are on its payments at the start of the year, representing about £25m of that volume. The platform's margin on each payment is set at 0.5 percentage points for the example.

At the end of the example year the platform has 590 customers on its payments, about 59% of its customers, and £145m of volume. At a 0.5 point margin that is £725,000 a year of payments revenue, against £125,000 at the start. Change any input and the output changes; the point is that each lever contributes a different group, and the biggest line is rarely the campaign.

The figures are deliberately plain. Your own customers will have a different mix of rails, a different concentration at the top, and a different number of customers under contract. The method does not change; the groups do.

None of the four levers work if the product cannot carry them. Three things have to exist before a customer is asked to move.

1. A sign-up flow inside your product. The customer completes identity and bank checks without leaving your screens. If they are sent to a third party's form, a share of them stop there.
2. A reason that shows on screen. The reconciliation gap, the deposit that could not be taken, the refund that took three days. If the product does not show the cost of the old way, the ask is just a rate comparison.
3. A path for the awkward rails. Direct Debit mandates can usually be moved under the Bacs bulk change process rather than re-signed by every customer, but it is planned, not instant, and the sponsoring bank is involved. Card machines need a delivery date. Saved cards need a plan. The customer should hear what will happen to each before they say yes.

Your developer owns your product's integration, and the sign-up flow and the on-screen reasons are part of that build. What a payments partner brings is the payment products underneath, the sequencing, and the messages, built with you and sent in your name with your sign-off.

It is not forcing anyone. A customer who moves because the old provider was switched off will leave at the first bad month, and will tell the others. It is not a price war either: a customer who moved for a lower rate will move again for a lower one. The customers who stay are the ones who moved because the product got better when payments ran through it, and that is why feature gating and in-product moments do most of the work over a year, and campaigns do the rest.