Payment monetization refers to the practice of generating revenue directly from the payment transactions that flow through a platform. Rather than treating payments as a cost centre — a necessary utility that enables the core product — platforms that monetize payments turn every transaction into a revenue event. The most common approach is adding a markup to the processing fee: the platform charges its merchants or end users a per-transaction fee that exceeds the cost charged by the underlying payment processor, and the platform retains the difference as margin.
This revenue model has become a defining characteristic of successful platform businesses. Companies like Shopify, Toast, and Mindbody generate significant portions of their total revenue from payments, often rivalling or exceeding their software subscription income. The economics are compelling: a platform processing $1 billion in annual payment volume with a 50-basis-point margin on each transaction generates $5 million in payment revenue — recurring, scalable, and growing in lockstep with the platform’s transaction volume. For investors and acquirers, payment monetisation signals platform stickiness and a high-quality revenue stream.
However, capturing payment margin requires the platform to control the payment experience and the commercial relationship with the processor. Platforms that simply redirect users to an external checkout or let merchants connect their own Stripe or PayPal accounts have no visibility into — and no margin on — those transactions. Meaningful payment monetisation requires the platform to sit in the payment flow: processing transactions through its own merchant account, a payment facilitator model, or a white-label payment infrastructure that routes transactions on the platform’s behalf.
Shuttle Global enables platforms to monetise payments without becoming a payment facilitator or building their own processing infrastructure. Through Shuttle’s Embedded Payments, platforms process transactions through Shuttle’s multi-PSP layer and earn margin on every payment — online transactions, Payment Links, and Voice Checkout payments alike. Shuttle handles the underlying PSP relationships, PCI compliance, and transaction routing, while the platform defines its own pricing and retains the spread. Because Shuttle connects to 40+ PSPs, platforms can optimise not just their revenue but also their cost basis — routing transactions through the most cost-effective processor for each payment method and geography, thereby maximising the margin available to monetise.