The CCaaS Payments Revenue Opportunity: How Contact Centre Platforms Monetise Every Call

Your platform handles tens of thousands of customer service calls every day. A meaningful percentage of those calls end with a payment — a premium collected, a bill settled, a booking confirmed, a debt resolved. That payment clears through your customer's PSP, generates a transaction fee, and produces zero revenue for you.

That is the CCaaS payments revenue opportunity in one sentence: your platform is the delivery mechanism for billions in annual payment volume, and you are capturing none of it.

This piece walks through the math, the model, and the strategic case for changing that.

1. The Revenue You Are Not Capturing

Start with a representative mid-market CCaaS platform: 200 business customers, each handling an average of 5,000 calls per month. That is 1 million calls per month flowing through your platform.

Industry benchmarks consistently show that 12–20% of customer service calls involve a payment. Across insurance, utilities, debt collection, travel, and general customer service, a conservative midpoint is 15%. That puts payment-adjacent calls at 150,000 per month.

Average payment values vary by vertical — insurance premiums run around £200, utility bills around £80, debt collection settlements around £150, travel bookings around £300. A blended conservative average across a mixed vertical book is approximately £150 per transaction.

The arithmetic:

That is £800K to £1.35M per year in new, recurring revenue — from transaction volume already flowing through your platform. From infrastructure you do not have to build. From customers you have already acquired.

If your platform is larger — 500 business customers, higher payment density, higher average values — the numbers scale proportionally. A CCaaS platform with 500 enterprise customers and a weighting toward debt collection or insurance could be looking at £3–5M in annual payment revenue.

The question is not whether the volume is there. The volume is there. The question is who captures it.

2. How the Revenue Model Works

The mechanics are straightforward. A payment layer sits between your platform and the underlying PSP network. Every time a payment is taken through your contact centre — during a call, via an agent-assisted link, or through an automated IVR or AI voice flow — that transaction generates a fee. You earn a share of that fee.

There are three standard structures:

Revenue share. The payment layer collects the transaction fee and passes you a defined percentage. You have no exposure to payment processing risk. Revenue arrives as a clean share of volume.

Markup model. You set the merchant-facing payment rate. The difference between your rate and the underlying cost is your margin. This requires more pricing management but typically delivers higher yield per transaction.

Hybrid. A base revenue share plus volume bonuses at defined thresholds. This is common in larger platform partnerships where volume tiers are predictable enough to structure incentives around.

The key characteristic of all three models is that the revenue is recurring and compounding. Every new customer you onboard adds payment volume. Every payment-dense vertical you sell into increases yield per customer. The revenue grows with your platform — it does not require separate sales effort or additional headcount.

3. Why This Changes Your Unit Economics

Most CCaaS platforms price on a per-seat or per-agent basis, typically in the range of £30–100 per seat per month. This is a competitive market. Margins on seat-based revenue are under pressure from commoditisation, from AI-driven agent reduction, and from customer price sensitivity.

Payment revenue changes the unit economics in four meaningful ways.

Higher revenue per customer without higher cost. Payment revenue is earned on transaction volume — there is no marginal cost of delivery for you. When a customer processes £200,000/month in payments through your platform, you earn £600–£1,000/month from that customer in addition to their seat fees. Their seat count has not changed. Your cost to serve has not changed. The revenue per customer increases by 20–40%.

Better margins. Seat-based revenue carries sales, support, and infrastructure costs. Payment revenue, once the integration is in place, is largely margin. The incremental cost of processing one more payment through your platform is effectively zero. Payment revenue therefore carries significantly higher gross margin than your core seat revenue.

Increased customer lifetime value. When a customer embeds payments through your platform — when their agents are collecting payments during calls, when their payment workflows are configured, when their reconciliation runs through your reporting — they have made a significant operational commitment. That commitment creates switching cost that seat-based SaaS does not. Customers who use embedded payments do not leave at renewal for a competitor offering a £2/seat discount.

Lower churn. The correlation between product depth and retention is well-established. Customers using five features of your platform churn less than customers using two. Payments is the highest-value feature you can add to that mix — both because of the operational embedding described above and because payment capability often unlocks use cases (debt collection automation, IVR payment flows, AI voice agent payments) that make the platform genuinely irreplaceable.

4. Which CCaaS Verticals Have the Highest Payment Volume

Not all verticals are equal. If you are targeting specific industry segments, prioritise by payment density — the percentage of calls that involve a payment — and by average transaction value.

Debt collection and BPO: 40–60% payment call rate. This is the highest-density segment. Virtually every productive agent interaction involves a payment discussion, a payment plan negotiation, or a payment collection. Average values are moderate (£100–200 per transaction) but volume is extremely high. Debt collection customers represent the fastest path to meaningful payment revenue.

Insurance: 25–35% payment call rate. Premium collection, policy renewals, and claims-related payments generate consistent, predictable volume. Average transaction values are higher (£150–300). Insurance contact centres often handle large inbound payment volumes alongside outbound collection campaigns.

Utilities: 20–30% payment call rate. Bill payments, arrears collection, and payment plan management create steady, recurring volume. Average values are lower (£60–100) but the volume is very consistent — utilities contact centres process payments every day, year-round.

Travel and hospitality: 15–25% payment call rate. Booking deposits, itinerary changes, cancellation and rebooking fees, and upsell payments generate high average-value transactions (£200–500). Seasonal but very high yield per transaction.

Healthcare: 10–20% payment call rate. Patient co-pays, outstanding balances, and payment plan collections are growing as patient financial responsibility increases. Regulatory complexity is high but the payment volumes are significant — and the compliance requirements (PCI, HIPAA alignment) make embedded, certified payment infrastructure particularly valuable.

General customer service and e-commerce: 10–15% payment call rate. Refunds, reorders, and subscription management payments. Lower density than specialist verticals but very high call volumes mean aggregate payment totals can still be substantial for large e-commerce contact centre customers.

5. The Competitive Moat

The revenue case is compelling on its own. But the strategic case is arguably more important.

Enterprise RFPs for contact centre platforms increasingly include payment capability as a scored requirement. The ability to take a PCI-compliant payment during a call — via an agent-assisted flow, an IVR, or an AI voice agent — is no longer a differentiator. In payment-dense verticals, it is a baseline expectation.

If your platform cannot take a payment and your competitor can, you lose the deal. Not on voice quality. Not on AI capability. Not on integrations. On payments.

The first CCaaS platform in each vertical to own the payments relationship captures the customers. They embed operationally. They churn less. The platform that wins the insurance or debt collection or utilities contact centre customer with payments in place becomes very difficult to displace.

The platforms that follow compete for what is left — typically the smaller customers, the price-sensitive buyers, the accounts that did not require payments and therefore never built the deep operational dependency that drives retention.

The window to be first in your target vertical is still open. It will not stay open indefinitely. Every quarter that passes is a quarter in which a competitor is talking to your prospects about payment revenue and you are not.

6. What It Takes to Get Started

This is not a multi-year infrastructure project. The integration work required to add embedded payments to a CCaaS platform is measured in weeks, not quarters.

The practical requirements:

• Single API integration to a payment layer (such as Shuttle). No need to build payment processing infrastructure or manage PSP relationships directly.

• No PCI certification for your platform. The payment layer carries PCI DSS compliance. Your platform passes secure, tokenised payment data without ever touching card numbers.

• White-label presentation. Payments are branded as your platform feature. Your customers see your product — not a third-party payment widget.

• PSP flexibility. Your customers can bring their existing PSP relationship or use a default provider. You do not force PSP switching, which removes a major objection from enterprise procurement teams.

• Revenue from transaction one. Revenue share begins immediately on go-live. There is no ramp period, no minimum volume threshold before you start earning.

The integration path for a CCaaS platform typically involves: API connection for payment initiation (agent-assisted or automated), webhook-based payment status updates back into your agent desktop or CRM integration, and reporting dashboards for your customers. Platforms with existing telephony integrations find the technical lift modest.

7. The Cost of Waiting

Every month your platform operates without embedded payments represents a specific, calculable cost.

Using the mid-market model from the opening section:

• £67,000–£112,000 in revenue not earned per month. That is the revenue share on £22.5M in transaction volume that flows through your platform and produces nothing for you.

• Enterprise deals lost to competitors. In verticals where payment capability is a requirement, you are not losing on product quality — you are losing on a missing feature with a known, fixable solution.

• Churn that payments would have prevented. Customers who would have stayed if payments had created operational lock-in are leaving for platforms that have solved what you have not.

• Market positioning that widens over time. The competitor who wins the insurance vertical with payments in place builds a reference base, a case study library, and a vertical reputation that compounds. The longer you wait, the harder that gap is to close.

The payments revenue opportunity does not diminish over time — transaction volumes are growing as AI voice agents and automated payment flows increase the proportion of calls that result in a payment. But the competitive window for being first in your vertical does diminish. The cost of waiting is both financial and strategic, and it increases every quarter.

What Next

If you manage product, partnerships, or commercial strategy at a CCaaS platform, the starting point is a volume calculation specific to your customer base: how many calls, what payment call rate, what average transaction value. The numbers in this piece are conservative by design. Your actual opportunity may be significantly larger.

From there, the integration conversation is a short one. The technical, compliance, and commercial structure is well-defined for CCaaS platforms. The outstanding question is not whether the model works — it works, and other platforms are already earning from it. The question is how quickly you choose to start.

Related Reading

• Embedded Payments for CCaaS — the platform operator's guide to adding payment capability

• How Platforms Monetise Payments Without PSP Lock-In — the general monetisation playbook

• Voice AI Is Booming — But Can It Take a Payment? — the market context

• How AI Voice Agents Take PCI-Compliant Payments — the technical architecture

• What Is Embedded Payments? — the fundamentals

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