Embedded Payments for CCaaS: The Platform Operator's Guide

Your platform handles the hardest thing in customer communications — live voice, real-time intent, emotional conversations, AI routing. You've invested heavily in getting that right. But there's a moment in thousands of calls every day where everything falls apart: the customer says they want to pay.

What happens next on your platform?

If you're like most CCaaS operators, it's one of three things — and none of them are good.

The CCaaS Payment Problem

Option one: The agent reads out a payment link URL. The customer writes it down, hangs up, navigates to a browser, and completes payment 20 minutes later. Or doesn't. Your call centre just became a lead generation tool for cart abandonment.

Option two: The call transfers to a legacy IVR for card entry. A significant share of customers drop at the transfer. Those who stay through an archaic IVR experience blame your customer for the frustration, not the underlying system. And the IVR is almost certainly running on infrastructure your enterprise customer owns and maintains separately — which is why they came to you in the first place.

Option three: The agent takes the card number verbally. You already know this is wrong. It puts card data into your call recording, your transcription pipeline, your storage layer. You're now in scope for full PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, with everything that entails. If you're running AI transcription and summarisation — and most of you are — that card data is flowing through models you don't control.

Now layer in AI voice agents, and it gets worse. Your AI agent can handle intent, triage, scheduling, account queries, even escalation logic. But the moment a customer says "I'd like to pay my bill," the AI hits a wall. It can't securely capture a 16-digit card number. It can't do DTMF isolation. It can route to a human — but that's a step backward from the autonomous flow you've built, and it defeats the cost efficiency argument you're selling to enterprise buyers.

This is not an edge case. For CCaaS platforms serving utilities, insurance, debt collection, telecoms, or any business that collects recurring or transactional payments through the contact centre, payments are core to the call flow. Not an afterthought.

Why Bolting On a Gateway Doesn't Work

The obvious response is: "We'll add a Stripe integration." It's the wrong answer, and here's exactly why.

PCI scope is the first problem. The moment card data touches your platform — your telephony infrastructure, your recording layer, your data pipeline — you inherit PCI scope. That's not a checkbox exercise; for most CCaaS platforms it means a full QSA audit, significant infrastructure changes, and ongoing compliance overhead. Your enterprise customers will ask about this in procurement. If you can't answer it cleanly, you lose deals to competitors who can.

DTMF isolation requires purpose-built infrastructure. Secure card entry over voice relies on DTMF — the customer presses keys on their keypad. But those keypresses can be captured in call recordings as audible tones. A compliant DTMF capture solution pauses or mutes the recording during card entry, isolates the keypad input from the voice stream, and processes it through a secure vault. That's not a Stripe feature. That's not something you build in a sprint.

AI agent handoff is a hard technical problem. Your AI voice agent is in mid-conversation. The customer needs to pay. The AI needs to hand off to a secure payment flow — without dropping the call, without breaking context, without a perceptible dead zone in the conversation. That flow needs to confirm payment success back to the AI so the call can continue. This requires a payment layer that understands the call context, not a generic checkout widget.

Your enterprise customers have their own PSPs. A utility company with 50,000 customers processed through your platform has an existing relationship with Worldpay, or Adyen, or Braintree. They're not switching gateways because you've added Stripe. Any payment solution you embed needs to support the customer's existing gateway. Locking your customers into a single PSP is a deal-breaker at enterprise level, and you'll discover that fact during procurement conversations when it's too late.

Adding a gateway solves none of these problems. You need a payment layer built for CCaaS infrastructure.

What Embedded Payment Infrastructure Looks Like for CCaaS

The right architecture separates your platform from PCI scope entirely. Here's how it works in practice.

During a call — whether handled by a human agent or an AI voice agent — when a payment moment is reached, your platform triggers a handoff to the payment layer. The payment layer takes over the PCI-sensitive portion of the interaction: it captures card details via DTMF keypress (with recording paused and isolated), processes the transaction through the customer's existing PSP, and returns a payment confirmation to your platform. The call continues.

Your platform never sees card data. Your recording layer never sees card data. Your AI pipeline never sees card data. Your PCI scope stays minimal — a significant advantage when you're selling to regulated industries or enterprises with procurement security requirements.

The same payment layer handles:

• Voice (DTMF) — secure keypad capture during live calls, with AI agent handoff support

• Chat — secure card capture within a chat conversation, no redirect required

• Payment links — for follow-up payment after a call, with link generation triggerable from your agent interface

• AI agents — a defined API handoff that works mid-conversation, returns confirmation to the agent flow

One integration. All channels. No PCI scope on your platform.

The architecture also supports white-labelling — the payment experience is branded as your platform, not as a third-party vendor. Your enterprise customers see your brand throughout. Their customers see their brand. Nobody's wondering who "Shuttle" is in the middle of a call.

The Revenue Opportunity You're Missing

Let's be direct about what's at stake commercially.

Your platform is processing calls that involve payments every day. Every one of those payments is a transaction event you're not capturing revenue from. You're handling the hardest part — the real-time conversation, the AI inference, the routing, the integration complexity — and then handing off the payment to infrastructure that earns the transaction revenue instead of you.

Run the numbers for your platform. If you handle 100,000 calls per month and 15% involve a payment averaging £150, that's £2.25 million in monthly transaction volume flowing through your platform. At a thin revenue share — 0.2% or 0.3% — that's £4,500 to £6,750 per month from a single mid-sized customer. Scale that across your customer base and you're looking at a seven-figure annual revenue stream that currently doesn't exist in your P&L.

The commercial model works because payments scale with your customers' growth. When your customer processes more calls, they process more payments, and your revenue share grows automatically. It's recurring, it's predictable, and it costs you almost nothing to earn once the integration is live.

Payments go from being a gap in your platform — a thing enterprise buyers notice you're missing — to a profit centre that improves your unit economics and differentiates your offering.

And there's a churn dynamic here worth naming: CCaaS platforms that offer embedded payments create switching costs that platforms without payments don't have. When payment data, reconciliation workflows, and merchant configuration are all inside your platform, your customers don't leave.

The Five Things to Get Right

If you're evaluating embedded payment options for your CCaaS platform, these are the five criteria that matter. Anything that can't satisfy all five is either a compliance risk or a commercial compromise.

1. PCI scope isolation. The payment layer carries PCI compliance, not your platform. Card data should never touch your infrastructure, your recording layer, or your AI pipeline. Ask specifically whether DTMF capture isolates keypresses from the voice recording. Ask which PCI tier the payment provider is certified at.

2. Channel coverage. You need a single integration that covers voice (DTMF), chat, payment links, and AI agent handoff. If you're adding channel-specific point solutions, you're building technical debt and creating inconsistency in the payment experience across your platform.

3. PSP flexibility. Your enterprise customers have existing gateway relationships. Your payment layer must support multi-PSP routing and allow each customer to use their own gateway. Any solution that requires a single PSP will fail enterprise procurement at companies with established payment relationships.

4. White-label. The payment experience should be branded as your platform. Your checkout, your merchant portal, your payment links — all carrying your brand. A third-party logo appearing mid-call flow is a trust problem and a positioning problem.

5. Speed. You should be able to integrate, test, and go live in weeks, not months. Full PCI DSS certification typically takes 6-12 months for a platform building payment infrastructure from scratch. If your provider is asking you to go through that process, they haven't solved the problem. The whole point of embedded payments is that the compliance work is already done.

How Shuttle Works for CCaaS Platforms

Shuttle is a payments infrastructure provider built specifically for platforms — CCaaS operators, AI voice providers, SaaS businesses — that need to embed payments without becoming payment businesses.

A single API integration connects your platform to Shuttle's payment layer. From there:

For voice calls: When a payment moment is reached, your platform triggers a Shuttle DTMF capture session. The customer enters their card details using their keypad. Recording is paused. Card data is captured directly into Shuttle's PCI-certified vault, processed through the customer's PSP, and a confirmation returns to your agent interface. The call continues.

For AI voice agents: Shuttle provides a defined handoff API for mid-conversation payment capture. Your AI agent triggers the payment flow, Shuttle handles the secure capture, and a success or failure event returns to the agent flow. No call drop, no context loss, no human escalation required.

For chat: Secure card capture within the chat conversation without redirecting the customer to an external page.

For payment links: Generate and send payment links from within your agent interface. Links are white-labelled, expire on a schedule you control, and payment status updates back to your system.

PSP coverage: Shuttle supports 40+ PSPs. Your customers use their existing gateway. You don't force them to switch, and you don't lose enterprise deals over PSP lock-in.

White-label merchant experience: Your brand on the checkout, the payment confirmation, and the merchant portal. Shuttle is the infrastructure layer — your platform is what the customer sees.

Revenue share: Shuttle's commercial model returns transaction revenue to you as the platform operator. You earn on every payment processed through your customers.

Timeline: Weeks to integration and testing, not months. Shuttle carries the PCI compliance — your scope stays minimal throughout.

PolyAI, one of the leading AI voice agent providers, uses Shuttle to handle payment capture within their agent conversations. Their AI agents handle the full call flow — including payments — without breaking to a legacy IVR or transferring to a human agent. That's the architecture that's now possible.

What Your Competitors Are Doing

The CCaaS market is moving toward embedded payments as a platform capability, not an optional add-on.

Enterprise buyers evaluating CCaaS platforms are starting to ask the payments question in procurement: "How do payments work within the call flow?" Platforms that can answer that question clearly — with a compliant, white-labelled, multi-PSP capable payment layer — are winning deals that platforms without payments are losing.

This isn't speculative. The contact centre use case for embedded payments is being driven by the same forces driving AI agent adoption: cost efficiency, customer experience consistency, and operational consolidation. A platform buyer who is consolidating their contact centre onto your platform doesn't want to maintain a separate payment IVR. They want payments to work within the same flow.

The platforms that integrate payments now build a structural advantage: sticky customers, recurring transaction revenue, and a cleaner answer to the enterprise procurement question that's coming more frequently.

Waiting to prioritise this means leaving that revenue uncaptured, entering more procurement processes at a disadvantage, and doing the integration work later under more pressure.

Related Reading

• Voice AI Is Booming — But Can It Take a Payment? — the market analysis behind the opportunity

• AI Payment Security: How AI Agents Handle Card Data — the PCI architecture explained

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

• How Platforms Monetise Payments — the revenue model for platform operators

• What Is Embedded Payments? — the fundamentals if you're new to embedded payments

Talk to Us About Adding Payments to Your CCaaS Platform

If you're building or operating a CCaaS platform and payments is on your roadmap — or should be — we're worth 30 minutes of your time.

We've worked with CCaaS operators and AI voice providers on exactly this problem. We know what the integration looks like, what the enterprise procurement questions are, and what the revenue model can return to your platform.

Book a Discovery Call — See How It Works for Platforms