When payments move from back office to growth engine

Ignition’s platform shows how embedded payments can transform customer workflows and business growth.

When Australian company Ignition launched more than a decade ago, its founders were focused on building a software business. Their plan was straightforward: a platform that helped accounting and bookkeeping firms manage proposals, agreements, and client onboarding in one place.

That model has evolved since. Over time, the company discovered that the real value it delivered to customers wasn’t simply organising paperwork or automating workflows. It was helping businesses get paid.

“Back in the day we really saw ourselves as software, and payments was a plug-in or an add-on,” says Dane Thomas, co-founder and chief product officer at Ignition. “But the unlock was realising that if we’re helping customers get paid and taking their debtors to zero, then we are actually a payments company.”

Ignition today serves more than 8,500 service businesses across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. More than one million end-clients interact with the platform, which processed over A$3.5 billion in payments last year.

The switch in thinking, from viewing payments as a back-office function to treating them as a core growth capability, reflects a broader change taking place across many enterprises. It’s a shift that is examined in detail in a recent report by payments processing giant Stripe, which looks at how a number of ANZ enterprises are driving innovation through payments.

The report found that payments have evolved from a back-end function into a strategic asset that drives revenue, enhances customer experiences, and unlocks operational efficiencies at scale.

Delivering Payment

For many professional services firms, the most difficult part of running a business isn’t winning clients – it’s getting paid.

Accounting firms, consultants and advisers often rely on manual billing processes that leave them chasing invoices weeks or months after work has been completed. They frequently have to write off debt and quietly absorb the cost. Ignition’s platform was designed to change that pattern by embedding payments directly into the client engagement process.

Under its model, businesses create a digital proposal outlining the scope of work, pricing and terms of service. Clients are asked to provide payment details as part of signing that agreement. Once the contract is approved, billing happens automatically.

The simple step of requesting payment details at the outset changes behaviour on both sides of the relationship.

“Even just asking for a payment method during that signing process — it sets the right message. It sets the expectation that you’re going to pay for these services,” Thomas says.

For many businesses using the platform, the impact is immediate. Instead of spending hours following up invoices, firms can focus on higher-value activities such as growing their client base or expanding their services.

“A lot of our customers have gone from having a really high accounts receivable or debtor issue, to it just not being part of their business.”

The Stripe Making Transformation Pay report puts a sharper number on the problem Ignition is trying to solve: up to 95% of Australian accounting firms waste valuable time collecting late payments. Ignition’s answer — to embed the payment details before the work even begins — means the awkward client conversations about money largely disappear.

Growth Platform

Ignition’s experience also reflects a broader trend identified in the report: companies that integrate payments deeply into their products often unlock new avenues for growth.

The partnership between Ignition and Stripe dates back nearly a decade. As Ignition expanded beyond Australia, it needed payments infrastructure that could support global operations.

“I often describe payments like an iceberg — there’s this little bit above the water and quite a lot of complexity underneath the surface,” Thomas says.

An early attempt with another provider exposed that complexity quickly. While the front-end functionality looked promising, manual onboarding steps and complex know your customer (KYC) obligations made the model difficult to sustain. Ignition began integrating Stripe in 2015 before migrating its remaining payment processing in 2019.

Supporting local payment methods proved essential for customer adoption. The ability to offer region-specific options — from bank debits in Australia and New Zealand to ACH transfers in the United States — helped Ignition enter new markets more quickly and was, Thomas says, the difference between gaining traction and hitting an adoption wall.

That infrastructure has since compounded into something more significant than payment processing. Ignition recently rolled out Stripe Capital – which offers revenue-based financing to businesses based on their payment history- to its US customers, converting years of payment history on the platform into working capital access, creating a path to growth for its small business customers.

For Thomas, the logical endpoint of that trajectory is agentic commerce: AI systems capable of completing transactions autonomously, without a human reviewing or approving each step.

It is a shift he sees as inevitable, and one that raises fundamental questions about what a client agreement platform needs to look like in a world where the client may not be a person at all.

“Are there certain services that people can just purchase where there doesn’t need to be a big agreement around? And can we just let that happen without a human in the loop?” he says.

For a company that started out treating payments as an afterthought, the road ahead looks very different.

Read the full Stripe Making Transformation Pay report, here.

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