Every Software Company Is Becoming a Fintech

There's a shift happening, and it's bigger than payments.

Software companies are no longer just selling features. Platforms like Shopify, Uber, and Airbnb have shown what's possible when financial flows are woven directly into a product: new revenue streams, stronger retention, higher valuations. Money moving through your platform changes everything.

Now AI companies are following the same path, and accelerating it. AI agents are beginning to initiate transactions, manage budgets, and trigger payouts autonomously. The companies building these agents aren't just software businesses anymore; they're financial infrastructure, whether they planned to be or not. When your product moves money, even indirectly, you need the financial layer to match.

So the question isn't whether to embed finance into your product. It's how, and whether your infrastructure can grow with you when you do.

The problem nobody warns you about

Most product teams find out the hard way: building the financial layer is very expensive, whether you're a startup taking your first payments or a scale-up expanding across borders.

Payments, payouts, refunds, chargebacks, reconciliation, sub-merchant onboarding, each piece tends to live in a different system. Stitching them together means more integrations, more edge cases, and more manual work. What was supposed to be a growth engine becomes an engineering burden.

It often starts small. A single webshop, one country, straightforward payouts. Manageable. But then growth kicks in: you add POS terminals, enter a new market, support multiple currencies, onboard sub-merchants. With most legacy PSPs, every step is a new project: new contracts, new settlement logic, new reconciliation structures, 2–4 months of engineering each time.

The costs compound quietly. For a platform at €200M GMV, the numbers look like this:

• €300k to integrate a traditional PSP before go-live

• €400k/year in ongoing maintenance API updates, reconciliation fixes, new payment methods, reporting corrections

• €1M+/year in hidden operational costs from reconciliation alone

Over three years, that's easily €2.5M in costs that never appear on a transaction fee invoice. And smaller companies heading in this direction are building toward exactly the same wall, just a few steps behind.

What embedded finance should actually feel like

Software companies shouldn't have to become infrastructure companies to own their financial flows.

It should be simple: one integration, one payment lifecycle, one source of financial truth. When payments, payouts, and reconciliation run through the same data model, complexity disappears instead of compounding. Engineering moves faster. Finance closes books without friction. Sub-merchants get paid on time and trust your platform.

That's why we built Rootline

We set out to build the financial engine we always wished existed: one that sits inside your company and handles everything: accepting, routing, and reconciling transactions across every channel and currency, automatically.

Rootline replaces legacy PSPs within retailers, software companies,  marketplaces, SaaS companies, and platform businesses. Whether you're just starting to embed payments or already processing at scale. A single API covers online, POS, multi-entity, and multi-currency from day one. Going from a single webshop to omnichannel to multi-country isn't a reintegration project, its configuration. You build once, and the infrastructure grows with you.

The outcomes are straightforward:

• Lower integration and maintenance costs: one API replaces a patchwork of providers, cutting hundreds of thousands in engineering spend

• Easy to start, built to scale: go live simply and expand to new channels, countries, and currencies without ever rebuilding your integration

• Automated reconciliation: no more manual stitching, no finance overhead, no support tickets from confused sub-merchants

• No hidden operational costs: the €1M+/year that quietly drains reconciliation-heavy platforms stays in your business

• More revenue, less overhead: when payments stop being a cost center and start running themselves, the margin impact is direct and compounding

Fintech and payments can be a growth driver. With Rootline, they are and the difference shows up on your bottom line.