TSG (The Strawhecker Group), an analytics, intelligence, and solutions firm serving the payments ecosystem, has partnered with Stripe, a programmable financial services company. The partnership aims to help platforms, software providers, and their investors approach payments as a structured growth strategy, covering monetisation, activation, and long-term performance.
Focus on monetisation and platform growth
According to the companies, payments has become one of the factors separating higher-performing businesses from others in the market, with the difference described as strategic rather than technical. Through the partnership, TSG and Stripe intend to combine data, strategy, and execution support to help organisations address this gap.
As part of the collaboration, TSG will work alongside Stripe on several areas, including clarifying monetisation models and pricing strategy, reducing friction across compliance, onboarding, and activation processes, improving attachment rates and margins, and shortening time-to-value across partner and customer ecosystems.
While the partnership is intended to apply across multiple growth channels, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms and independent software vendors (ISVs) have been identified as a particular area of focus. For these businesses, aligning payments strategy with broader business objectives is expected to affect revenue growth, operational efficiency, and enterprise value.
Industry context
Payments monetisation has become a recurring theme for software platforms and ISVs, many of which have integrated payments functionality directly into their products in recent years. As Embedded Finance has expanded, platforms have increasingly needed to balance compliance requirements, onboarding friction, and payments economics alongside their core software offering. Advisory partnerships of this kind reflect that shift, positioning payments strategy as a component of platform growth rather than solely a back-office function.
Mike Strawhecker, TSG President & CEO, stated that payments is increasingly viewed as a growth component rather than only infrastructure, and that the partnership with Stripe is intended to give platforms, software providers, and investors a clearer path from data to decision-making to action.
The partnership builds on TSG's existing industry research and benchmarking work, which the firm positions as part of its broader advisory role for payments companies. For Stripe, the collaboration extends its work with platforms and software providers by adding a dedicated strategic advisory layer focused on payments monetisation and performance.
Further details on the scope of the partnership, including how it will be structured operationally and which specific platforms may be involved first, have not been disclosed.
