Ask a nursery manager how parents pay them and you will still, in 2026, hear the same answer surprisingly often: bank transfer, chased by email. The invoice goes out at the start of the month. Some parents pay the same day. Others pay after the second reminder. A few need a phone call. Multiply that across a client list and the person running the business is spending hours a week being their own accounts receivable department.
SME card adoption has lagged in exactly these places. Retail adopted cards decades ago; the gap is in service verticals: health services, education, field services, professional training. The same nursery runs its bookings, registers and parent communication through modern software. Payments are the one part of the operation that never got upgraded. Card networks call these "underserved sectors". The people running businesses in them mostly call it normal.
The explanation is that traditional card acquiring was designed for retail businesses, and invoice-based businesses never quite fitted it. Adoption finally moves when card payments arrive inside the software these businesses already run. Which is why the change is coming from vertical SaaS platforms, and why Mastercard's route into SME payments now runs through their payment providers rather than one merchant at a time.
The barriers are rarely what payments people assume.
Nobody sold cards to these businesses in context. A dental practice or a driving school doesn't wake up wanting a merchant account. Traditional card acquiring was built for retail: a shop, a till, a terminal. A business whose "checkout" is an invoice sent after the work is done never fitted that mould, so the industry's default products never quite fitted it either.
Then the setup burden lands on the busiest person. Opening a standalone merchant account means forms, underwriting, KYC documents and a separate system to reconcile against the software where the actual business lives. For a five-person field services firm, that admin belongs to the owner. It stays on the to-do list for years.
Bank transfers also feel free. A transfer costs the business nothing visible, so card fees look like pure cost. What the comparison misses is the invisible spend: the chasing hours, the late payments, the awkward phone calls, and the revenue that quietly leaks when paying is hard. None of that shows up as a line item, so it rarely gets weighed.
And old habits are mutual. If a business has always invoiced, its customers have always transferred. Neither side moves first without a reason.
The result is a strange split: sectors that digitised everything else still settle up like it's 1995.
Stripped of industry language, cards change three things for a small business, and a fourth for the platform serving it.
Money arrives when the customer decides to pay, not weeks later. A card payment made against an invoice settles in days. A bank transfer arrives when the customer gets round to sending it. For a business managing cashflow week to week, that gap decides whether payroll is comfortable or tense.
Paying becomes the easy option. A pay-by-card link on an invoice, a saved card for recurring fees, a tap on a terminal at the end of a job. Each removes a decision point where payment used to stall, and businesses that make paying effortless get paid sooner with less chasing.
The network does the worrying. Card payments come with fraud screening and a formal dispute process; a bank transfer, once sent, is much harder to recall. Mastercard's advanced fraud protection is part of what its network provides, so the SME gets that security without building anything.
The fourth effect belongs to your platform. When payments flow through the same system as bookings and invoicing, your SME users finally see who owes what in one place, and your software becomes markedly harder to leave. Payments revenue also compounds with usage: SaaS platforms partnering with Unipaas have gained more than 5x payment service users, more than 10x payment volume, and 5-10x average growth revenue per user. (There is more on that in how embedded finance increases retention and stickiness.)
It helps to be precise about what a card network actually does, because "accepting Mastercard" and "having a Mastercard partnership" are different things.
Mastercard and Visa are open-loop networks: they route authorisations and settle funds between the customer's card-issuing bank and the business's payment provider, set the scheme rules, and operate the rails, but they don't sign up merchants directly. American Express historically runs a closed-loop model, acting as network, issuer and acquirer in one, though it also works with partner banks and payment providers in many markets. Discover is a fourth major network, best known in the US market.
For an SME, the practical takeaways are short:
Which is exactly what happened next.
Unipaas announced a partnership with Mastercard aimed at precisely the gap this article describes: SMEs on vertical SaaS platforms in sectors where payments are still predominantly manual and offline. Health services, education and childcare, field services and professional training among them.
The logic of the pairing: Unipaas supplies the embedded payment infrastructure that lives inside SaaS products, with onboarding, AML, KYB and KYC checks, risk and support fully managed. Mastercard supplies the global network and fraud protection underneath. Together, your platform can offer its SME users card acceptance that works out of the box, inside software they already trust, instead of asking them to go and procure payments on their own.
George Simon, Executive Vice President, Market Development at Mastercard, put it this way in the announcement: "we are enabling SMEs using SaaS platforms to enhance their payment experiences, improve acceptance rates, and unlock new opportunities."
The reason this route can work where direct-to-SME selling struggled is distribution. The nursery software provider has the relationship, the context and the moment: fee collection is already happening inside its product. Embedding card payments there removes every barrier listed earlier in one move. No separate merchant account, no reconciliation gap, no busiest-person-does-the-paperwork problem.
For an SME weighing it up, or a SaaS platform deciding what to offer its users, the evaluation comes down to a handful of questions:
Card acceptance in these verticals follows whichever route makes paying easiest, and for these SMEs that route is increasingly the software they already use. When the payment runs inside the platform, reconciliation, card on file and payment data sit in the same system as the bookings and invoices they relate to.
Mostly friction, not preference: standalone merchant accounts involve setup and underwriting that busy owners defer, card fees are visible while the cost of chasing bank transfers is not, and traditional acquiring products were designed for retail rather than invoice-based businesses.
Faster settlement than waiting on bank transfers, higher and quicker payment completion because paying is easier, built-in fraud screening and dispute handling from the card networks, and cleaner records when payments flow through the same software as invoicing.
It combines Unipaas's embedded payment infrastructure for SaaS platforms with Mastercard's network and fraud protection, so that SMEs in traditionally offline sectors, such as health services, education, field services and professional training, can accept card payments directly inside the software they already use.
No. A payment provider bundles network acceptance. SMEs on a Unipaas-powered platform get major cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, direct debits and bank transfers through a single integration, with onboarding and compliance handled for them.
Quickly, because activation happens inside software the business already uses, with KYC and onboarding running in the background rather than blocking it. For the platform itself, embedding payments with a provider like Unipaas takes 3-6 weeks to go live, against the 6-12 months a typical in-house build costs. (How the main platform options compare.)
Download the white paper on the full value of embedded payments
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