What the ISV Shift Has Actually Done to the Numbers
McKinsey’s research, as reported by coinflow.cash, found roughly 90% of US merchants now use an independent software vendor solution for payments or business management, up sharply from 48% in 2022. Revenue flowing through that channel grew at roughly 20% a year for five straight years, an estimated climb from $6.5 billion in 2020 to $16 billion in 2025, now representing about 60% of total acquiring payments revenue available from small and mid-sized merchants.
Bain & Company’s estimate, as cited by nmi.com, points the same direction from a different angle: the embedded-payments revenue opportunity for software platforms and their infrastructure providers is projected to more than double, from $21 billion in 2021 to $51 billion in 2026. Read together, both figures describe the same trend, more of a merchant’s payments relationship is being absorbed into the software they already use to run their business.
What Our Own Statistics Page Already Concludes
VA Horizon’s merchant-services industry statistics page publishes these exact McKinsey and Bain figures already, and its own closing line puts the takeaway plainly: the ISO market itself holds steady, while what it actually costs in effort to win a merchant keeps shifting. We are not disputing that conclusion, and we are not re-presenting the numbers above as a fresh discovery, that page did the work of publishing them first.
What that page deliberately doesn’t do, by design, is make a first-person case for any one distribution model. It reaches a market-level verdict for an ISO audience. This piece is the narrower, personal argument underneath it: why we, specifically, still build around a human agent rather than treating the ISV shift as a signal to automate the relationship away.
The Layer Embedded Payments Routes Around, Not Through
An ISV embedding payments into its own software is solving a routing problem, moving a transaction through a processor with less friction for a merchant already inside that software. It is not solving a qualification problem, whether this specific business is a good fit for this specific processing relationship, what its actual volume and risk profile look like, and whether the person on the other end trusts the deal enough to sign it.
That qualification-and-trust layer is what a human conversation does that a software integration cannot. A merchant adopting an ISV’s bundled payments option because it’s already inside their point-of-sale software is a different decision than a merchant choosing to trust a specific agent or ISO with their processing relationship, and the growth numbers above describe the first decision, not the second.
Why This Is a Different Argument Than “ISOs Survive”
It would be easy to read this piece as simply restating that ISOs aren’t going away, which our own statistics page has already established. Our argument is narrower and more specific: even inside a market where more revenue routes through embedded channels, the moment that actually decides whether a merchant signs still runs through a relationship, not a checkout flow. That moment is what a human agent, not a software integration, is built to close.
A relationship that survives a merger, a platform migration, or a pricing change is worth more to both sides than a routing decision embedded in software a merchant didn’t choose for its payments terms in the first place.
What This Means for How We Book Appointments
This is an argument for keeping a human conversation in the part of the process where the growth numbers above don’t reach, the moment a merchant decides who to trust with their processing relationship, not an argument against ISVs, embedded payments, or the software layer growing the way McKinsey and Bain both describe.
Human + AI SDRs exist to protect exactly that moment, texting a real conversation with a merchant instead of routing the qualification step through an automated flow.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- McKinsey, Decoding ISV Maturity: A Global Playbook for Payments Growth
- nmi.com, Embedded Payments Are Blurring the Lines Between ISO and ISV