A conversation with Dana Warren on modern platform payments

Dana Warren brings over 15 years of experience building and scaling payments infrastructure across fintech and platforms. As Head of Global Strategic Platform Partnerships at Stripe, she architected embedded payments and financial services strategies for the company’s largest SaaS partners. Previously, she led merchant distribution for PayPal’s proprietary consumer credit business and held roles at American Express spanning corporate payments and merchant services.

Today, as an investor at Canaan Partners, Dana partners with founders building the next generation of fintech and software infrastructure. She works with early stage ventures on go-to-market strategy, embedded finance, and strategic partnerships – drawing on her operating experience to help teams identify PMF, differentiate in the market, build their teams and win in the market.  

This breadth – from card networks to fintech platforms to venture investing – gives Dana a distinctive perspective on the evolving payments landscape: when platforms should monetize financial services, how to approach compliance and partnerships, and where emerging technologies like AI create new opportunities and risks in money movement.

The context for this conversation: Most platforms now recognize payments as strategic, but execution has become more complex. Should you prioritize payment facilitation, embedded lending, or payout optimization? Build compliance capabilities in-house or partner? And as AI begins touching money movement, what new considerations emerge?

We asked Dana how modern SaaS platforms should navigate these decisions.

Interview Questions:

1. You’ve seen platforms at Stripe layer on wallets, financing, and payouts beyond core card processing. When a SaaS company is evaluating their next move in embedded finance, what are the make-or-break questions they need to answer before they commit resources?

I’ve witnessed first hand the danger of a platform adding embedded finance features because competitors are doing it, because the revenue share looks attractive on paper, and/or their investors demand it without context. But if you’re building wallets or lending without understanding whether it reduces churn, increases take rate, or unlocks a higher-value customer segment, you’re just adding operational complexity, and frankly, serious risk to your operations.

My advice for a founder, a product team or anyone in the C-Suite for that matter is to consider these three initial questions:

1. What customer problem are you solving and will they pay for it?

Start with the customer. Are there gaps in financial services access that create friction or limit growth? Will your solution deliver measurable value like higher conversion, increased loyalty, expanded wallet share?

PayPal Credit worked because it solved real problems: it increased merchant basket sizes, brought incremental customers to checkout, and reduced friction. Merchants and consumers both won. That made adoption inevitable, not optional.

If you can’t articulate the specific behavior change or economic outcome your embedded finance product enables, you’re not ready to build.

2. Do you understand the regulatory and compliance requirements?

This isn’t glamorous, but it’s existential. Financial services means navigating data privacy laws, AML/KYC requirements, lending regulations, and state-by-state licensing. The costs of non-compliance aren’t just fines, they’re reputational damage and operational chaos.

If your team doesn’t have deep expertise here, don’t assume you can learn on the fly. This is where the build-versus-partner decision becomes critical.

3. Can you staff this without distracting your core business?

This is where I see the biggest miscalculations. Compliance, treasury management, and financial product support aren’t tasks your software engineers or product marketers can absorb as side projects. They require dedicated teams with specialized skills.

If you can’t commit the right people and functions, you’ll either under-invest and create risk, or pull focus from what makes your platform valuable in the first place. Be honest about capacity before you commit.

2. Surcharging and cost recovery are back in focus as margins tighten – but compliance is increasingly fragmented by state, province, and card network. How should platforms approach this strategically without creating an operational nightmare or damaging customer relationships?

 Surcharging is having a moment because margins are tight – but this is a clear build-versus-partner decision, and the answer is partner.

You’re navigating state laws, card network rules (that vary across networks!), and international compliance frameworks. The programming complexity is significant, and it’s not a one-time build but instead it requires ongoing monitoring and jurisdiction-specific logic.

The risks of getting it wrong are significant and include material fines, network penalties, merchant confusion and of course the dreaded reputational risks. These clearly far outweigh any benefit from building in-house. Leverage partners who’ve already absorbed this complexity.

As an incredible product partner once said to me at Stripe, ‘there’s genius in knowing what not to build.’

3. Yeeld’s model is dually product and services-led. From your experience working with Stripe’s largest partners, where do you see the highest ROI from bringing in a specialized payments partner versus trying to staff and build it all internally?

In my experience across numerous fintechs and platforms, the highest ROI from specialized payments partners comes in three areas: compliance, payment optimization, and speed to market.

Where partners deliver outsize value:

a. Compliance and risk

Partners bring pre-built KYC/AML frameworks and regulatory monitoring. Building in-house means staffing an entire function that doesn’t differentiate your product, and the largest financial services providers have the market for talent here.

b. Payment optimization

Authorization rates, routing logic, and fraud detection are specializations unto themselves. Teams of experts maintain proprietary models and network relationships, agonizing over incremental basis points that translate to millions in GMV. Scaling economics prevent platforms from replicating this in-house.

c. New capabilities 

Adding BNPL, local payment methods, expanding across markets, or integrating AI enhancements requires massive build cost. Partners bring pre-built solutions and local expertise.

The hybrid advantage:

The most sophisticated platforms know their customers and own the experience but partner on infrastructure. A dually product-and-services model gives you the technology stack plus the team that tunes it for your use case and actively manages optimization as the landscape shifts. That ongoing partnership is where real ROI compounds.

4. Your time at Amex and PayPal means you’ve dealt with enterprise buyers who expect white-glove treatment and have complex requirements. What fundamentally changes for platforms when they start selling payments and financial services to large, multi-entity customers – and how should they prepare?

This could be a separate blog post! Enterprise buyers treat payments as mission-critical infrastructure at massive scale, and their expectations are sky-high.

SLAs become contract negotiations, implementations stretch from weeks to quarters, and legacy systems often require bespoke solutions. You need designated resources on both sides across engineering, product, legal, finance, and support to run launch and ongoing programs. The economics shift too: margins compress, security protocols intensify, multi-entity structures demand consolidated reporting, and product requests reflect unique enterprise needs.

Platforms that successfully move upmarket plan early for the financial, resourcing, and technical lift required to handle bespoke requirements without breaking their product roadmap or distracting the core business.

5. Fast forward 12–18 months. What does “payments maturity” actually look like for a modern SaaS platform – and what role should specialized partners like Yeeld play in getting them there versus what platforms should own internally?

In 12-18 months, payments maturity means payments is no longer a project but instead it’s integrated infrastructure driving measurable business outcomes.

Mature platforms have moved beyond “we process payments” to using payments as a strategic lever. Operationally, acceptance is optimized, compliance is systematized, and reconciliation is automated. Strategically, they’re using transaction data to inform underwriting, predict churn, and identify expansion opportunities. They’ve made clear build-versus-partner decisions based on actual customer demand, not competitor pressure.

What most platforms should own: The customer relationship, product experience, and strategic decisions like merchant onboarding, checkout UX, how payment data surfaces, pricing strategy, and which financial services to offer.

Yeeld is uniquely positioned to offer streamlined implementations, cleaner and scalable integrations, strategic advisory, and key products that speed the platform’s time to market and maximize revenue and customer satisfaction. 

The clearest signal of maturity is articulating exactly what you’re hiring a partner to do and why. Early-stage platforms outsource payments because they don’t know what else to do. Mature platforms partner strategically because they know their constraints, their differentiation, and where specialized expertise compounds value faster than building in-house.