Why don't customers switch to your integrated payments?

The integration passed every test. The pricing is lower than most customers pay today. The announcement went to the whole base. Six months on, the share of customers on your payments is a number nobody wants to put on a slide, and the account managers have started saying "they're happy where they are".

They are not happy where they are. They are busy, and switching is a job with no deadline. Understanding why customers stay put is the difference between a launch that stalls and customers who move, and it starts with admitting that the reasons are almost never about your price.

The gap is normal. The 2026 Vertical SaaS Embedded Payments Benchmarking Study from Rainforest, fielded in the first quarter of 2026 across hundreds of platforms, found that 78% of platforms target an adoption rate of 71% or more and only 25% have reached it. BCG's 2025 work on embedded finance put it another way: more than half of relevant independent software vendors in North America now offer embedded payments, yet only a single-digit percentage of merchants consistently use the finance products their software offers, and more than 80% of the embedded finance market remains in play.

Both studies are North American. There is no UK benchmark yet, and the UK has its own switching problem, documented by the regulator, which is where the rest of this guide starts.

In November 2021 the Payment Systems Regulator published the final report of its market review into card-acquiring services, covering merchants with turnover up to £50m. It found that small and medium-sized merchants rarely search, switch or negotiate, even when they could get a better deal, and named three features of the market that restrict their willingness and ability to do so.

The remedies were given as specific directions to the largest providers and have been in force since 2023. For a platform they do two useful things: the summary box gives your customer a number to compare against, and the 18-month terminal limit means in-person customers now have a date within reach rather than a lease that never ends. Neither remedy moves anyone on its own. They remove two excuses.

The PSR described the market. Four more reasons sit inside the platform's own product, and they are the ones you can fix.

1. The default still points the other way. New customers are offered the old provider on the sign-up form, or sales offers it to close faster. If new customers are not starting on your payments, the existing ones have no reason to think it is the normal path.
2. There is no feature pull. If reconciliation, deposits, refunds from the order screen and payouts work identically whichever provider the customer uses, the only thing on offer is a rate. A rate is a reason to look, not a reason to move.
3. The ask arrives at the wrong moment. A newsletter in March to a customer whose terminal lease ends in September. The message was fine; the date was not.
4. The awkward rails have no plan. The customer asks what happens to their Direct Debit mandates, their saved cards and their card machine, and the answer is "we'll sort that out". They stay put, reasonably.

Customers switch when changing costs them nothing, and those moments are already in your product's data. A terminal lease reaching its 18-month limit. A renewal of your own subscription. A second site opening. A failed collection that has to be chased by hand. The first time the customer opens the reconciliation screen and sees the invoices that do not match. Each of these is a date on which the cost of switching drops to near zero, and the platform usually knows the date before the customer does.

The practical change is to stop treating the ask as a campaign and start treating it as an event in the product. When the moment arrives, the message is on screen, the reason is specific to that customer, and the sign-up flow is one click away, inside your product, not on a third party's form.

The cheapest lever is the one platforms most often leave unpulled. Every new customer starts on your payments; the old provider is a request, not an option. This does two things. It raises the share on your payments every month without a single conversation, and it changes what "normal" looks like to the customers who have been with you for years. When a customer rings support and hears that most new customers take payments through the product, the question stops being "why would I?" and becomes "why haven't I?".

Defaults also protect the sales team from itself. If the old route has to be asked for, it stops being the path of least resistance in a deal.

A lower rate on its own, for the reasons the PSR set out: the customer cannot see what they pay today, so your rate has nothing to beat. Switching the old provider off, because the customers who move under pressure are the first to leave and the loudest when they do. And a single email to every customer, which spends the best moment on everyone at once and gives the customers who were not ready a reason to say no they will repeat for a year.

What moves customers is a reason inside the product, a moment the customer can see, and a default that makes your payments the normal path. The platforms in the benchmark studies that reached their target share of customers did those three things; the ones still below it are usually still relying on the rate.