Payroc today published a survey in which 97% of respondents at software companies said slow or complex payment integrations had cost their organizations revenue. The research, carried out by Censuswide among 750 senior professionals at independent software vendors in the US, the UK and Canada, also found that 73% had delayed or decided against adding a payment capability because integration was too costly or complex. Payroc, a payment-processing acquirer based in Tinley Park, Illinois, sells the integration tools the survey describes, and released the figures through Business Wire at 1:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

In Short

A payments company asked 750 people who work at software companies whether hooking payments into their products had ever cost them money, and almost all of them said yes. That matters because the apps businesses use to take bookings, orders and payments depend on this plumbing, and a feature that never ships is a sale nobody makes. The catch is that the company asking the question sells tools to make that plumbing faster, and it has published only headline percentages, not the full results.

What the survey measured

The method is set out in a short note at the bottom of the release. According to Payroc, Censuswide surveyed 750 senior professionals aged 25 and over working at independent software vendors (ISVs) and software providers. The sample was split evenly, with 250 respondents in each of the US, the UK and Canada. Fieldwork ran from September 2 to September 11, 2026.

Respondents held a wide spread of jobs. The release lists founders, chief technology officers, chief product officers, chief revenue officers, technical leads, software engineers, developers and integration engineers. Censuswide describes itself in the release as a consultancy specializing in quantitative and qualitative research "for PR, marketing and insight purposes," and says it is a member of the Market Research Society and the British Polling Council and a signatory to the Global Data Quality Pledge.

The headline on the release refers to "97% of businesses." The respondents, however, all work at software companies. The figure describes people at ISVs and software providers, not businesses in general, and the body of the release frames it that way: "Almost all software providers (97%) say slow or complex payment integrations have cost them revenue."

Revenue lost, features shelved

Two figures carry most of the weight. The first, the 97%, measures whether respondents believe slow or complex integrations have cost their organization revenue at some point. The release gives no amount, no time frame and no indication of how the loss was measured. A respondent who saw one delayed launch and one who watched a product line stall would both count.

The second figure is more concrete. According to Payroc, 73% of respondents said their organization had delayed or decided against adding a payment capability because integration was too costly or complex. That describes a decision rather than a perception: a feature postponed or abandoned. The release does not say which capabilities were affected, whether card-present terminals, online checkout, payment links or recurring billing, or how long the delays lasted.

Paul Vienneau, Payroc's chief technology officer, put the loss in terms of things that never happen. "Most software companies aren't unhappy with their payment provider, but they are paying for integration in ways that rarely show up on a balance sheet: launches that slip, features that never get built, markets they don't enter," he said in the release.

That framing helps explain why the revenue figure is so hard to check. Revenue that was never earned does not appear in accounts. It exists as an estimate inside the heads of the people who made the trade-off, which is precisely what a survey of founders, product leads and engineers captures.

Satisfied, and not moving

A second tension sits inside the results. According to Payroc, 97% of respondents said their current payment provider meets their needs well. In the same survey, 80% agreed that the cost and complexity of switching payment providers made their organization less likely to move, even when unhappy with its current provider.

Both figures can be true at once. A software company can be content with a processor and still recognize that replacing it would be expensive. Yet the pairing raises a question the release does not answer: if nearly every respondent is satisfied with the provider they have, where do the integration losses come from? One reading is that the losses arise when companies try to add new payment capabilities, rather than from the integration they already run. Another is that switching costs keep some companies with a provider they would otherwise leave, and that the 97% satisfaction figure reflects resignation as much as approval. The published numbers do not distinguish between the two.

For a processor seeking new software partners, an 80% figure on switching friction cuts both ways. It describes a market where incumbents are hard to dislodge, and it is the problem a faster integration product is pitched to solve.

AI in the integration stack

The release devotes much of its space to artificial intelligence. According to Payroc, 96% of software providers said AI had already helped their organization make payment integration faster, easier or more cost-effective. Three-quarters (75%) said their organization would be ready to adopt AI-powered or agentic payment integrations within seven to eleven months, and 48% expect such integrations to become standard within one to two years.

None of these terms is defined. "AI had already helped" could cover anything from a developer using a coding assistant to read documentation, to a company letting an autonomous agent write and deploy integration code. The phrase "AI-powered or agentic payment integrations" is similarly broad. The seven-to-eleven-month window is also unusually specific, and the release does not say whether the 75% includes companies that are ready sooner or counts only those choosing that band.

Security tops the list of barriers

Enthusiasm did not remove the concerns. According to Payroc, security was the most frequently cited barrier to adopting AI-powered or agentic payment integrations, named by 43% of respondents. The cost of adoption followed at 38%, and organizational risk at 36%. The release does not give the full list of options offered or the share citing each of the others.

Payroc drew its own conclusion from that ranking. "For adoption to scale, payment providers will need to show that faster integration does not come at the expense of security, traceability or accountability," the release states.

The ordering matches what other surveys of software teams have found. A Nylas study of 1,026 respondents, fielded in December 2025, found only 4% of teams let AI agents act without any human approval, with security approvals the top implementation blocker at 49.8% and integration complexity next at 44.1%. Gartner predicted in June 2025 that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing rising costs, unclear business value and insufficient risk controls. Payroc's three leading barriers, security, cost and organizational risk, map closely onto that list.

Who is asking the question

Payroc is not a neutral observer of payment integration. According to the company boilerplate, Payroc WorldAccess, LLC was founded in 2003, processes more than $125 billion in card volume annually, operates across 47 regions and holds direct connections to the major card networks. The company describes itself as ranking among the top merchant acquirers in North America, and says its technology supports card-present, card-not-present and omnichannel payments for software providers, financial institutions and merchants.

Its recent product releases target the same audience the survey polled. On May 19, 2026, Payroc launched Integration Essentials, a set of prebuilt hosted components covering online payment pages, embedded payment fields, payment links and in-person acceptance. On October 6, 2026, it launched Payroc for Developers, which it calls an AI-native platform for software companies and ISVs. That earlier release listed documentation structured for developers and AI agents, a set of "Integration Skills" that give context for working with Payroc, a self-service developer portal with sandbox access, access to the Payroc API and human support. It did not name the AI coding tools supported or give pricing.

Today's release links the survey directly to that product. According to Payroc, Payroc for Developers gives software companies an agentic integrations platform to launch integrated payments in minutes rather than months, "backed by the support and monetization of a true payments partner." The reference to monetization reflects how integrated payments are sold: a software company that embeds a processor's payments into its product can share in the revenue those payments generate, which gives it a reason to integrate and a reason to stay. Payroc offers no data in the release to support the minutes-rather-than-months claim.

What the release leaves out

The published material consists of headline percentages. Several details that would allow the figures to be weighed are missing:

  • the wording of each question and the answer options offered;
  • results broken down by country, which the even 250-respondent split would allow;
  • results broken down by role, so that founders and revenue chiefs can be separated from engineers who may have less sight of commercial outcomes;
  • the size of the companies surveyed and the verticals they serve;
  • whether respondents were Payroc customers, customers of competing processors, or both;
  • a margin of error or any note on weighting.

The absence of a role split matters most for the revenue figure. Whether a company lost revenue to a delayed payment feature is a commercial judgment, and the release does not show whether the 97% holds equally among the integration engineers and the chief revenue officers in the sample.

Why this matters for marketers

Payment integration is the point where a marketing budget becomes a transaction, and the survey describes friction at the layer below most advertisers' view. The respondents build the booking systems, ordering platforms, point-of-sale software and vertical applications through which many small and mid-sized businesses take money. A payment feature delayed at an ISV is a checkout option missing for every merchant on that platform, regardless of how much traffic advertising sends to it.

The AI questions in the survey also connect to the commerce infrastructure that PPC Land has tracked through 2026. Google published the Universal Commerce Protocol on January 11, 2026, and on the same day Visa positioned its token system as infrastructure for agent purchases, binding tokens to specific consumers, cards, apps and devices so that agents never handle raw card numbers. Microsoft launched checkout inside Copilot on January 8, 2026 with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe. Mastercard and Google introduced Verifiable Intent in March, a cryptographic record of what a consumer authorized an agent to buy, with acquirers and processors including Worldpay, Fiserv, Checkout.com and Adyen among its endorsers. In April, Stripe was among five companies that joined the UCP Tech Council, and the FIDO Alliance formed a payments working group chaired by Mastercard and Visa to write specifications for agent-initiated commerce, with no timeline for drafts.

Adoption has trailed the announcements. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT with Stripe on September 29, 2025, and shut it down in March 2026. Walmart had disclosed that products sold inside the chatbot converted three times worse than those that sent shoppers to its own site. In May 2026, Originality.ai found that only 26 sites had implemented UCP.

Those protocols assume that payment acceptance is already wired into the software merchants use. Payroc's survey, for all its limits, describes the people who do that wiring as slow to add new payment capabilities, reluctant to switch providers and wary of handing integration work to AI on security grounds. If 73% of software providers have postponed or abandoned a payment feature for cost or complexity reasons, how quickly will agent-ready payment rails reach the long tail of merchants that advertisers and commerce platforms are trying to reach? The release does not say, and its own security figures suggest the answer depends less on speed than on whether providers can prove that faster integration is safe.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Payroc, a payment-processing acquirer based in Tinley Park, Illinois, which commissioned research firm Censuswide to survey 750 senior professionals at independent software vendors and software providers.

What: 97% of respondents said slow or complex payment integrations had cost their organization revenue, 73% had delayed or decided against a payment capability over cost or complexity, 80% said switching costs made a move less likely, and 96% said AI had already helped with integration. Security was the most cited barrier to AI-powered or agentic payment integrations, at 43%. Payroc sells integration products, including Payroc for Developers, launched on October 6, 2026.

When: Fieldwork ran from September 2 to September 11, 2026. Payroc published the results today.

Where: The survey covered 250 respondents in each of the US, the UK and Canada.

Why: The software companies that embed payments into booking, ordering and point-of-sale products decide which checkout options merchants can offer. Their reluctance to add payment features, switch providers or trust AI with integration work affects how quickly agent-driven commerce, now backed by Google, Visa, Mastercard and Stripe, can reach the merchants that advertisers pay to send traffic to.