There’s a high-stakes question that always comes up for platforms handling payments: “So how deep into PCI scope do we fall?”. For many teams, the answer isn’t obvious. It’s the moment they start worrying about audits, controls, backend exposure, and operational responsibilities they never intended to take on.
Laying the wrong payment infrastructure can pull a platform into PCI scope the moment it tries to facilitate payments. Yet, the truth is, you don’t have to carry that burden. With the right payment partner, you can embed payments deeply into your product while staying at the lightest-touch PCI level: SAQ A.
That’s where the embedded payments opportunity lies - you maintain full control of the payment experience, and eliminate compliance drag - while enjoying the benefits of unlocking new revenue streams, reducing churn, and improving your customers' experience.
PCI DSS is the security framework governing how card data must be handled. Any system that touches, stores, or moves cardholder data becomes part of your PCI scope. And the moment cardholder data touches any part of your infrastructure, whether frontend code or backend systems - you take on significantly more regulatory weight: more controls, more audits, more cost, and more work.
PCI Level SAQ A is exactly designed for companies that want to avoid all of that. It applies only when card data is fully outsourced - meaning it never touches your infrastructure, logs, analytics events, or operations.
For vertical SaaS platforms that want to own the checkout experience without inheriting compliance overhead, SAQ A is the ideal target.
Many payment providers force a trade-off between experience and compliance. If you want branding and control, you take on risk. If you want to stay de-scoped, you give up flexibility.
Unipaas was purposely built to remove that trade-off entirely - card data flows behind the scenes directly from the buyer’s browser into Unipaas and never through your servers, while you can maintain a fully branded experience within your platform and remain safely de-scoped.
Unipaas offers two simplified approaches for embedding the payment checkout:
1. Embedded Checkout SDK – Ideal for teams that want payments natively integrated within their own UI. You control the page layout, while Unipaas securely handles all sensitive input fields through iFrames. The checkout feels native and polished, but PCI exposure remains entirely on Unipaas’ side. You retain full UX control without increasing your compliance burden.
2. Unipaas Hosted Checkout – A fully managed payment page that seamlessly matches your brand. Buyers feel like they never leave your environment, and as always your backend never touches sensitive data. You interact only with safe tokens and webhook events.
This architecture - your brand on the front end, card data securely on Unipaas’ side - keeps platforms at SAQ A compliance, no matter how deeply payments are embedded.
Embedding card capture securely is only part of staying de-scoped. Scope creep often shows up in unexpected places: onboarding flows, payout setup, reporting tools, dispute workflows, even customer support screens.
Unipaas addresses this by offering white-label embedded components for merchant onboarding, reporting, payouts, and reconciliation. You present these as part of your product, ensuring a consistent user experience, while Unipaas manages all sensitive logic behind the scenes. You keep the operational workflows your merchants expect without inviting regulated data into your infrastructure.
As you expand your offering with terminals, TFC, Direct Debit or open banking - you do so without increasing your PCI exposure - Unipaas absorbs the complexity, you keep the velocity.
At Unipaas, protecting payment data is a core principle. Our SOC 2 Type 2 certificate demonstrates our dedication to the highest standards of data security, availability, and confidentiality.
Combined with our PCI DSS Level 1 certification, the highest security standard in the payments industry, Unipaas operates with robust internal controls, a secure infrastructure, and a proactive approach to risk management. Whether enabling card payments on your platform or supporting vendor onboarding, we ensure payment experiences that are seamless, secure, and fully aligned with the industry’s most rigorous benchmarks.
With Unipaas, running at SAQ A becomes the natural state of your platform. Card data never touches your systems, you maintain a fully branded in-platform experience, and sensitive operations stay with Unipaas.
If you’re building a vertical SaaS platform, staying at the lowest PCI scope while offering a fully embedded, fully branded payment experience is your holy grail - and Unipaas gives you the foundation to do exactly that: securely, simply, and without the operational burden. Book a call today.
For most platforms, the lowest practical PCI level is SAQ A - achievable when all cardholder data capture and all PCI-relevant payment flows are fully outsourced to a PCI-compliant payment provider, and your platform never handles card data directly.
SAQ A applies when all sensitive payment data and flows are fully handled by the payment provider and never touches your systems - including your servers, backend or frontend code, logs, analytics tools, or internal operational systems.
Not necessarily. “Embedded” refers to the user experience, not PCI exposure. Your PCI scope depends on whether your infrastructure touches sensitive payment data. An embedded checkout can still qualify for SAQ A if all sensitive fields are handled entirely by the payment provider, for example, through pre-built embedded components like those provided by Unipaas.
SAQ A can still apply when your platform uses webhooks and tokens, as long as they contain only non-sensitive data. The key is ensuring your systems handle only non-sensitive tokens and payment event notifications, with no cardholder data ever included, logged, or stored.
These workflows can expand PCI scope if they expose sensitive data or require regulated handling. When implemented so your platform handles only non-sensitive tokens, identifiers, and payment events - and all sensitive operations remain with the payment provider - PCI exposure stays minimal. Effective de-scoping, for example through embedded components like those provided by Unipaas, involves outsourcing not just card capture, but all sensitive operational surfaces around payments.
Unipaas’ white-label embedded payments architecture was purpose-built to let your platform deliver a fully embedded, branded payment experience while Unipaas handles all payment-related sensitive data. This is enabled through Unipaas’ pre-built embedded components that keep sensitive payment inputs and processing on Unipaas’ side, while your platform interacts only with non-sensitive tokens and payment events. This enabled platforms to keep sensitive data completely out of your servers, logs, analytics tools, and internal systems, reducing operational and compliance overhead.
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