Behind every “Pay now” button sits an increasingly complex financial stack designed to remove friction and prevent failure. Unsplash

Not long ago, going cashless felt novel. Today, tapping a card—or clicking “Pay now”—barely registers. Expectations have shifted quickly, and by 2025, consumers largely assume payments will run themselves. The commercial pressure is real: merchants lose an estimated $18 billion per year to abandoned carts, and every failed transaction costs roughly $12 in direct and indirect losses. Any extra step introduces friction, and any decline erodes revenue and trust.

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Embedded payments are designed to address both problems. They sit beneath the surface of digital products, removing friction and allowing payments to function as a native feature rather than a separate event. When designed well, the customer barely notices the transaction at all, yet the underlying infrastructure is doing far more work than it appears. The new baseline is simple: the payment disappears into the........

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