The Promise of Payroll APIs | Andreessen Horowitz

PAYG’s defining characteristic is the alignment of cost and value. PAYG companies charge customers for only what they use, which means customers pay for only what they need. In favorable market conditions, this can be a boon, as PAYG companies are set up to quickly capture increases in activity. This alignment is more worrisome in a down market bec... See more

While it’s hard not to love Stripe and its operational excellence, they're often not the sole payment processor a company uses. Companies with scale tend to integrate with a handful of payment processors, gateways, and banks to manage payment inflows and outflows through a distributed architecture. On top of integrating across many payment systems,... See more

Despite strong technology players like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Robinhood, traditional banks are still dominant.

Theoretically, with all of these new ‘fintech’ tools available, there should be infrastructure with rich API connectivity that allows for the movement of money across all of these applications through a PFM. Interesting companies like Astra Finance are building in the space of ‘autonomous money’, but many companies are still fairly siloed in their ... See more

- Integrated payments and lending are unlocking new business models for software companies and vastly improving the user experience.

But with SaaS + fintech, a vertical SaaS company can capture a customer’s traditional software spend as well as the spend on employee and financial services.