Payment as a Service Market

More than 6 million merchant locations in over 175 countries now settle through one combined Global Payments and Worldpay platform, a single installed base since Global Payments completed its Worldpay purchase on 12 January 2026, as its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records. Payment as a service is cloud-delivered payment acceptance sold to merchants, software platforms and banks for a fee; the market covers gateways, processing platforms, fraud screening, orchestration, tokenization, compliance tools and merchant financing run on the same rails. Douglas Insights counts 24.6 million active merchant accounts on such platforms worldwide in 2025, each paying an average USD 886 a year in net platform fees, which puts the Payment as a Service market at USD 21.80 billion. Revenue climbs to USD 82.93 billion by 2035, a 14.30% annual rate built from 11.40% account growth and 2.60% fee growth. The title belongs to our banking, financial services and insurance coverage, and every figure follows the Douglas Insights research methodology.

Which payment as a service segment makes the money: gateways, fraud screening or orchestration?

Payment gateway and processing platforms make the most money in payment as a service, with 38.7% of 2025 revenue, or USD 8.43 billion. Every merchant account needs authorisation, capture and settlement before it buys fraud or orchestration tools, so the gateway fee sits on all 24.6 million accounts.

Payment gateway and processing platforms grow 11.70% a year to USD 25.50 billion, close to the account count because every new merchant starts here. Security and fraud protection holds 19.3%, USD 4.21 billion, and compounds at 17.40% because card-not-present screening is billed per transaction; Stripe lists its Radar screening from USD 0.05 per screened transaction. Payment orchestration and API services take 14.9%, USD 3.25 billion, and form the fastest-growing segment at 18.15% a year, reaching USD 17.21 billion by 2035, since merchants that route across two or more acquirers buy one routing layer above them. Regulatory compliance and tokenization carry 11.6%, worth USD 2.53 billion, growing 14.45% as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) scope reduction moves card data off merchant servers. Merchant financing services hold 8.3%, USD 1.81 billion, growing 12.95% on cash advances repaid from card takings. Implementation and managed services hold 7.2%, USD 1.57 billion, and grow slowest at 8.50% because application programming interface (API) onboarding needs fewer consultant days each year.

Douglas Insights expects the six payment as a service segments to sum to USD 83.05 billion in 2035, within 0.15% of the USD 82.93 billion headline. Deployment splits into public cloud and hybrid cloud, with public cloud taking most new accounts. Buyers split into large enterprises and small and medium enterprises; the second group holds most of the 24.6 million accounts but pays far less per account.

Why are embedded checkouts and cross-border sellers boosting payment as a service accounts?

Embedded checkouts inside vertical software add 3.90 of the 11.40 points of yearly account growth in payment as a service. Cross-border sellers add 2.80 points, new rails 2.10, legacy acquirer migration 1.60 and outsourced security 1.00, so five forces explain the whole volume leg.

The first driver is software that sells payments inside its own product. Stripe says more than 5 million businesses run on it directly or through platforms, and that its 2025 cohort of new users grew about 50% faster than the 2024 cohort, per its 2025 annual letter of 24 February 2026. Douglas Insights credits embedded payment as a service with 3.90 points of account growth a year, the largest single contribution.

The second driver is the cross-border seller. Stripe reports that 57% of companies joining it in 2025 were based outside the US. Mostly-international businesses on Stripe earn 30% of their international revenue from countries that are neither their home market nor a top-10 economy. Each of those sellers needs local acquiring, currency conversion and local payment methods from one integration. We assign this pull 2.80 points.

The third driver is new money movement. Stripe handled about USD 400 billion of stablecoin payments in 2025, roughly double the year before, with an estimated 60% business-to-business (B2B), the same Stripe letter shows. Euro instant credit transfers are the other new rail. Douglas Insights gives new rails 2.10 points, since each rail reaches merchants as one more payment as a service method rather than a separate project.

The fourth driver is consolidation among legacy acquirers. Global Payments now runs about 94 billion transactions and USD 3.7 trillion of volume a year after closing the Worldpay deal on 12 January 2026, according to its SEC filing, and it invests more than USD 1 billion a year in innovation. Merged acquirers move bank-referred merchants onto cloud gateways to retire duplicate platforms, which we score at 1.60 points.

The fifth driver is outsourced security. Of the 64 new requirements in PCI DSS version 4, 51 became effective on 31 March 2025, the PCI Security Standards Council notes, including quarterly scans for small ecommerce merchants. Many answer by handing card data to a hosted payment page. That shift adds 1.00 point. The five contributions, 3.90, 2.80, 2.10, 1.60 and 1.00, add up to the 11.40-point volume leg.

Which headwinds slow payment as a service adoption among merchants running in-house acquiring?

Three headwinds remove about 2.10 points a year from payment as a service account growth: large merchants building in-house payment stacks, margin pressure on providers, and licensing friction in new countries. Without them, the volume leg would run near 13.50% rather than 11.40%.

In-house stacks cost 0.90 points. A retailer processing billions a year connects directly to card schemes and acquirers and buys only tokenization, leaving gateway fees behind. Adyen shows how one account can swing the numbers: its processed volume rose 8% in 2025 including one large-volume customer and 21% excluding it, per its results of 12 February 2026.

Margin pressure removes 0.70 points. Interchange-plus contracts pass card costs through, so a payment as a service vendor competes on a thin margin that Adyen lists at 0.60% plus USD 0.13 per transaction. Smaller providers that try to match that margin cut subsidised onboarding of low-volume sellers, and fewer marginal accounts open.

Licensing friction removes 0.50 points. Each new country needs a payment institution or e-money licence, local settlement and know-your-customer checks, so payment as a service providers enter markets one at a time. The three deductions, 0.90, 0.70 and 0.50, sum to 2.10 points.

How much does a card transaction cost on a payment as a service platform?

A USD 50 domestic card sale costs USD 1.75 on Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents list rate, while Adyen charges USD 0.43 plus interchange on the same sale. Douglas Insights puts average net payment as a service fees at USD 886 per merchant account in 2025.

Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed, and charges 0.8% for ACH Direct Debit, capped at USD 5.00, on its published price list. Adyen lists no setup or monthly fee and a USD 0.13 processing fee on every payment method, with Visa and Mastercard at interchange++ plus 0.60%.

Realised net fees fall into three bands, by Douglas Insights estimate. Micro sellers on blended list rates pay USD 150 to USD 600 a year in payment as a service fees after card costs. Mid-market merchants pay USD 6,000 to USD 45,000 once fraud, orchestration and tokenization modules are added. Enterprises on interchange-plus terms pay USD 250,000 and more. The 2.60% yearly fee leg reflects module attach rates, partly offset by take-rate compression on large accounts. The average reaches USD 1,145 by 2035.

Which companies win payment as a service merchants after the Worldpay merger?

Stripe, Adyen and Block's Square hold an estimated 32.9% of 2025 payment as a service revenue, a top-three concentration that leaves two thirds with banks, acquirers and regional gateways. Douglas Insights estimates Stripe leads with 13.9%, scaled from its USD 1.9 trillion of 2025 volume.

Stripe's estimate applies an assumed 0.16% net platform take to USD 1.9 trillion, giving USD 3.04 billion. Adyen reported 2025 net revenue of EUR 2.36 billion, up 18%, with a 53% margin on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), per its results release. Converted at an assumed 1.125 dollars per euro, that is USD 2.66 billion, a 12.2% share. Block's Square earned USD 3.94 billion of gross profit on USD 250.5 billion of gross payment volume; we attribute 37.6% of it, USD 1.48 billion or 6.8%, to payment as a service fees rather than software, hardware and lending.

Global Payments became a pure merchant business on 12 January 2026, buying Worldpay and selling its issuer unit, as its SEC filing states. FIS took that issuer business, now FIS Total Issuing Solutions, at an enterprise value of USD 13.5 billion; the unit handles more than 40 billion transactions a year in over 75 countries. PayPal reported USD 1.79 trillion of total payment volume for 2025, up 7%, and USD 33.2 billion of revenue, though most of that is wallet income outside our payment as a service scope.

Which region adds payment as a service accounts fastest, North America or Asia Pacific?

North America leads payment as a service with USD 8.15 billion in 2025, 37.4% of the total, because US software platforms embedded payments earliest. Asia Pacific grows fastest at 16.87% a year, from USD 5.21 billion to USD 24.76 billion, as cross-border sellers there sign on to global platforms.

North America grows 12.62% a year to USD 26.75 billion in 2035. Europe holds USD 6.06 billion, or 27.8%, and grows 13.55% as euro instant payments and PCI DSS work push merchants onto certified platforms. Asia Pacific starts at USD 5.21 billion and adds the most accounts, since 57% of Stripe's 2025 joiners came from outside the US. Latin America is worth USD 1.50 billion and grows 15.71% to USD 6.47 billion, led by marketplace and delivery apps that pay out to small sellers. Middle East and Africa is the wildcard at USD 871.8 million, growing 14.40% to USD 3.35 billion, because a few licence approvals decide whether global payment as a service providers enter a country at all.

How many merchant accounts run on payment as a service platforms today?

Douglas Insights counts 24.6 million active merchant accounts on payment as a service platforms in 2025, rising to 72.4 million at 11.40% a year. The count removes sellers holding accounts with two providers, excludes consumer wallet users entirely and covers all five regions.

The named providers disclose 11 million or more merchant relationships between them: more than 5 million businesses on Stripe and more than 6 million merchant locations at Global Payments. Regional gateways, bank-owned platforms and payment facilitators supply the remaining 13.6 million accounts in our estimate.

Transaction intensity varies widely across the payment as a service base. Global Payments' 94 billion transactions over more than 6 million locations work out to about 15,670 transactions per location a year, or 43 a day. A micro seller on an embedded checkout runs a few hundred a year, which is why the average fee per account stays below USD 1,000.

Which merchant verticals buy payment as a service beyond ecommerce checkout?

Retail and ecommerce merchants account for about 41.4% of payment as a service revenue, Douglas Insights estimates, ahead of travel and hospitality, healthcare, media and entertainment, and banks and financial institutions. Banks buy differently: they rent processing to issue cards and accept payments under their own brand.

Travel and hospitality sellers need multi-currency acceptance and the 1% conversion and 1.5% international-card surcharges that list prices carry. Media and entertainment buy recurring billing, the territory of our Subscription Billing Management Market study. Banks and financial institutions rent issuing and fraud scoring, and fraud models overlap with the Artificial Intelligence in Fintech Market. In-store acceptance at forecourts runs through hardware covered by the Outdoor Payment Terminal Market, while the payment as a service fee sits on the platform behind the terminal.

How do euro instant credit transfers and stablecoin rails reshape payment as a service volumes?

Stablecoin payments on Stripe reached about USD 400 billion in 2025, roughly double 2024, and euro instant transfers settle within ten seconds under the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) instant scheme. Both rails reach merchants as extra payment as a service methods priced below cards.

Stripe bought Bridge, whose volume more than quadrupled, and Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets, according to its annual letter. Stripe estimates 60% of its stablecoin volume is B2B, where card fees of 2.9% plus 30 cents make little sense on large invoices. Douglas Insights puts account-to-account and stablecoin methods at 3.6% of 2025 payment as a service fee revenue, about USD 784.6 million.

Which PCI DSS and instant payment rules must payment as a service providers comply with?

Payment as a service providers must comply with PCI DSS version 4.x, whose 51 future-dated requirements took effect on 31 March 2025. In the euro area they also follow Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on instant credit transfers. Both rules push merchants toward hosted, certified platforms and away from self-managed card data.

The PCI Security Standards Council retired version 3.2.1 on 31 March 2024, leaving version 4.0 and 4.0.1 as the only active texts. Requirement 11.3.2 makes ecommerce merchants on Self-Assessment Questionnaire A (SAQ A) run vulnerability scans at least once every three months through an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV). Requirement 12.5.2 adds an annual confirmation of PCI DSS scope.

The European Parliament and Council adopted Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on 13 March 2024, and it entered into force on 8 April 2024, as EUR-Lex records. The regulation aims to speed up the provision and uptake of instant payments in euro. For payment as a service vendors in Europe, the result is one more method to support at checkout, settled in seconds and priced against cards.

What if payment as a service account growth slows or speeds up before 2035?

The base case reaches USD 82.93 billion in 2035, the slower path USD 56.21 billion and the faster path USD 118.97 billion. Douglas Insights calculates that one extra point of yearly account growth lifts the 2035 payment as a service figure by USD 7.75 billion.

The slower case runs 8.10% account growth and 1.70% fee growth: large merchants in-source acquiring and take rates compress faster. The base case keeps 11.40% and 2.60%. The faster case, 14.60% and 3.40%, assumes orchestration and fraud modules attach to most mid-market accounts. The Worldpay merger, completed on 12 January 2026 per the Global Payments filing, matters in every case: a merged acquirer with more than 6 million locations can migrate its base quickly or stall new sign-ups while systems combine.

Published forecasts for payment as a service run from 17.20% to 31.45% a year. Our 14.30% sits below that band because we count net platform fees after interchange and scheme costs, not gross processing revenue.

Douglas Exclusive: the Payment Platform Scale Scorecard

The Payment Platform Scale Scorecard is a Douglas Insights model built from 22 sourced inputs taken from the 2025 filings, results and letters of six payment as a service providers. It scores each provider on the payment volume it added in 2025, indexed to the leader at 100, so buyers can see who is winning new merchants rather than who is largest.

The scorecard finds that Stripe added about USD 482 billion of payment volume in 2025, nearly twice the USD 256 billion that Adyen, PayPal and Square added together. Global Payments and FIS stay unscored because neither discloses comparable growth for the merged businesses. The gap matters for payment as a service buyers: new merchant volume, not installed volume, sets which platform ships fraud and orchestration features first.

How we built the payment as a service count from 24.6 million merchant accounts?

The payment as a service model multiplies 24.6 million merchant accounts by USD 886 of average net fees to reach USD 21.80 billion, across 5 regional models, 6 segments and 22 sourced company inputs. Accounts reach 72.4 million and the average fee USD 1,145 in 2035.

Cross-check one: estimated revenue for Stripe, Adyen and Square totals USD 7.18 billion, the 32.9% top-three figure. Cross-check two: Global Payments' disclosed transactions per location support the low average fee per account. Cross-check three: published 2025 sizes run from USD 14.52 billion to USD 23.63 billion, and ours sits 7.8% below the high end because it nets out interchange. The 2026 value is USD 24.91 billion.

Douglas Insights analysts drafted this study with AI assistance and checked every sourced figure against the linked primary pages. Company shares, the account count and the fee bands are Douglas Insights estimates, labelled as such wherever they appear.

Sources

1. Global Payments via SEC EDGAR Global Payments completes acquisition of Worldpay and divestiture of Issuer Solutions (2026)
2. Adyen Adyen publishes H2 2025 financial results (2026)
3. Stripe Stripe 2025 annual letter (2026)
4. Stripe Stripe pricing (2026)
5. EUR-Lex Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on instant credit transfers in euro (2024)
6. PCI Security Standards Council Future-dated requirements of PCI DSS v4.x (2024)
7. PayPal PayPal fourth quarter and full year 2025 results (2026)
8. Block Block Q4 2025 shareholder letter (2026)
9. FIS FIS completes acquisition of Global Payments Issuer Solutions (2026)