Fifth Third leads $9 million Series A in Cincinnati embedded-payments company Payload
The fintech, which says it is on pace to process more than $6 billion annually, plans to use its first major outside funding to add staff, broaden payment-rail integrations and push beyond its real-estate base into additional vertical-software markets.
Embedded-payments platform Payload has raised a $9 million Series A led by Fifth Third Bank, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier, giving the Cincinnati fintech its first significant outside funding since it was founded in late 2019.
The companies announced the strategic investment August 19th but did not disclose financial terms. Payload says it processes nearly $500 million in monthly payment volume—an annualized pace of more than $6 billion—and has maintained annual revenue growth above 100%.
The deal connects one of Cincinnati’s largest financial institutions with a startup seeking to make payments a native feature of the software businesses use to operate.
Payload co-founder and CEO Ryan Rybolt began his payments career at Fifth Third before leaving in 2004 to found Infintech. In 2019, he joined Ian Halpern, founder of multifamily and coworking payments company PlacePay, to launch Payload. The company processed its first payment in January 2020.
Why it matters
Business payments in industries with compliance obligations, multiple parties and legacy processes have often relied on checks, wires and disconnected payment tools.
Payload’s pitch is that software companies should be able to embed payment acceptance, payouts, risk monitoring and customer-verification functions directly into their existing workflows.
The company says its platform offers a unified API and object model, with integrated KYC and real-time risk monitoring. Halpern said developers can move from an initial API call to live payment processing in hours while retaining enterprise-grade security and more sophisticated payment controls.
Where Payload plays
Payload gained early traction in residential real estate, where it says it is among the leading processors of earnest-money deposits in the United States and Canada. It serves independent brokerages, title companies and national real-estate platforms.
The company has since expanded into:
- Legal payments
- Professional services
- Property management
- Homebuilding
- Franchise operations
- Software platforms embedding payments in their products
The company operates in the growing embedded-finance market, where banks, fintechs, and software providers are integrating payments and other financial services into business applications instead of requiring separate portals. Fifth Third has its own embedded-finance unit, Newline, and has continued expanding its commercial-payments business.
What they’re saying
“This investment is validation of what we’re building at Payload. A payments infrastructure that actually works for the businesses relying on it every day,” Rybolt said.
“I started my career in payments at Fifth Third, left to build Infintech, and launched Payload with Ian with a clear thesis: the way businesses move money was fundamentally broken and that the best fix was to make payments invisible inside the software they already use,” Rybolt said. “Fifth Third understands payments from the inside out, and they share our conviction about where this is all going.”
Halpern said Payload was designed to avoid the common tradeoff between easy but limited payment integrations and powerful, complex tools.
“Most payment integrations force a trade-off: you can have something simple but limited or something capable but complex, but rarely both,” Halpern said. “We refused that trade-off.”
What’s next
Payload said it will use the new capital to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, accelerate next-generation payment-rail integrations and move into more software ecosystems and industry verticals. Fifth Third will also serve as a strategic partner as Payload expands relationships with financial institutions, enterprise platforms and software companies across North America.
Fifth Third’s payments history includes Fifth Third Processing Solutions and a foundational role in the creation of Vantiv, which grew into one of the world’s largest payment processors. The investment is a vote of confidence in Payload’s effort to build a new layer of business-payments infrastructure inside the software companies already use.
