After Brandon Lloyd sold his second company, Bypass, a sports and entertainment point-of-sale and payment software company, to Fiserv in 2020, he dove deeper into the payments industry and realized one thing: Software companies were getting a bad rap from the payments provider industry.
“Companies like Stripe originally built this platform to make it easy for online merchants to accept credit cards,” Lloyd told TechCrunch. “With distribution moving from software vendors to merchants, merchants need support. Instead of generating revenue and doubling their SaaS revenue, they’re giving all of the payment revenue to their payment provider.”
It’s not uncommon for a software company to pay 2.9% and 30 cents for each transaction, and Lloyd believes they shouldn’t be paying that amount. Instead, he said their costs should be closer to 2% — and it’s that gap that leaves them with a huge business opportunity.
Lloyd left Fiserv in June 2023, taking with him colleagues Derek Victory and Danielle Madison to form Austin-based Fiserv. Before to pass on what they learned from the payments industry to the vertical SaaS community.
Forward works by allowing SaaS companies to rent its offerings as a service, collecting their own fees. Its software is integrated with its customers’ software, saving them money. Forward handles authorizations, settles transactions, transfers money, and handles reconciliation. And, because there are fewer payment fees, customers get to recoup some of those savings.
Lloyd said Forward is also focused on program design, enabling technical onboarding in less than a week, ongoing merchant sales support and the ability to migrate to a registered payment facilitator at any time.
It’s an ambitious goal to compete with Stripe and other payments infrastructure companies, but Lloyd believes Forward’s model has the advantage of shifting the economics to SaaS companies and helping them save money.
“The software company has acquired customers to enable payments through its software application, but when they implement this solution, very few of them achieve it at scale,” Lloyd said. “In some cases, this opportunity is equal to their software revenue. If they do payments right, SaaS companies can double their size in terms of revenue.”
Forward began processing payments in Q4 2023 as part of a beta period. It has since processed a few million transactions. It also already counts its former employer Fiserv as a customer. This strategic partnership allows Fiserv to expand into the managed PayFac category and more quickly bring its products to market to more than 1,500 SaaS companies that process tens of billions of dollars annually in payment volume.
Lloyd didn’t provide specifics, but said the company generates revenue. And it also pays revenue to its SaaS customers. For example, for every transaction made through Forward’s platform, software vendors get an average of 70 cents back by adding payments as a product.
It also excited investors. On Thursday, Forward announced $16 million in seed funding; Commerce Ventures, Elefund and Fiserv led the round.
Lloyd intends to use the new funding to expand the company’s capabilities in terms of customers and technology development, including machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“We have a lot of empathy for software companies because we built them ourselves,” Lloyd said. “When we meet with our customers, they remind us of what we were like 10 or 15 years ago. We genuinely support them, and I think it’s a breath of fresh air in the payments ecosystem.”