Embedded payments are becoming seamless, but complexity in risk and operations remains a challenge. The payments ecosystem is fragmented. Independent software vendors (ISVs), independent sales organizations (ISOs), banks and PayFacs all want to integrate payments into their customer experiences. But for these players, turning software into a payments business involves navigating complex trade-offs. That’s where NMI positions itself, focusing on simplifying and abstracting away those complexities. As Steve Pinado, NMI’s new CEO, noted to Karen Webster in an interview, “We enable efficient payments either embedded in software or through an ISO who has to manage multiple acquirer and multiple different merchant bases. If you think about where we sit, it is really as an enabler across a wide spectrum.” This balancing act underscores NMI’s role. Its platform lets partners pick and choose the functions they need, from signup to payout, while NMI manages the “plumbing” of payments infrastructure. NMI is uniquely positioned to serve as an intermediary that simplifies the many-to-many complexities between merchants, software providers and financial institutions. “What NMI has built great scale in is being a terrific partner to the providers that … own the customer relationship. We stand in the middle and make that easy for businesses, whether it’s for their unattended solutions or potentially medium-risk solutions,” he said. This many-to-many functionality, from signup to payout, is core to NMI’s value proposition. Instead of companies stitching together multiple back end providers, NMI acts as a hub that enables flexibility and scale across ISOs, platforms and ISVs.