Why the Smartest Payment Strategies Are Going Diagonal

Michael Johnson · 2026-10-14

### The Payment Problem Nobody Talks About For years, businesses have been forced into a frustrating choice. You could pick a horizontal payment platform that handles everything decently but nothing exceptionally well. Or you could go vertical, getting deep industry-specific features that leave you scrambling for basic functionality elsewhere. It's like choosing between a Swiss Army knife and a chef's knife. One does a little of everything. The other does one thing brilliantly. But what if you need both? That's exactly the tension more companies are feeling right now. They want the scale and flexibility of a broad platform without sacrificing the specialized tools their industry demands. ### Enter Diagonal Thinking Here's where things get interesting. Instead of picking a side, diagonal thinking says: why not both? A diagonal approach to payments infrastructure lets you serve multiple use cases without losing depth where it matters. You get breadth and specialization in the same package. Take healthcare. A single provider might juggle patient payments, insurance claims, payroll, benefits administration, and a dozen other financial workflows. Each has its own quirks and compliance requirements. Traditionally, that meant duct-taping together five different systems that barely talked to each other. A diagonal approach brings all of that under one roof while still respecting the unique needs of healthcare. That's not just convenient. It's transformative. ### What's Driving This Shift? Three forces are pushing diagonal payments from nice idea to necessary strategy. - **Modern APIs** let companies overhaul their payment operations without rebuilding their entire tech stack from scratch. That flexibility means more businesses can integrate directly with payment providers. - **Embedded finance infrastructure** is maturing fast. Research from McKinsey suggests embedded payments will grow more than 30% annually through 2034. - **Artificial intelligence** now handles operational complexity that used to require custom builds or extra staff. AI makes it feasible to tailor payment capabilities to very specific organizational needs. As Stephen Faust, CEO of Dash Solutions, put it during a recent PaymentsJournal podcast: "There's been more changes in payments in the last five years than in the 50 years before that." He's not exaggerating. ### The Pain of Legacy Systems Let's be honest about why this matters. Legacy payment methods are genuinely painful. "Where there are greenfield opportunities and where the APIs come in are in some of these spaces that have been difficult to conquer—the disbursements, the reimbursements, and the refunds," said Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research. Think about it. Writing checks for reimbursements? Nobody wants that. Manual refund processing? It's a nightmare. These are exactly the areas where diagonal thinking and modern APIs can make the biggest difference. ### The Real Goal: Invisible Payments Here's the thing that sometimes gets lost in all the technical talk. The ultimate goal isn't fancier payment technology. It's making payments so seamless and embedded that end users forget they're even happening. When payments work the way they should, business owners can focus on running their business. Not on chasing down failed transactions or reconciling mismatched records. That's what diagonal thinking really offers. Not just better payments, but the freedom to stop thinking about payments altogether. And in a world where the payments industry is expected to keep booming for years, that freedom might be the most valuable feature of all.