Zoho Payments: Keystone of Zoho’s FinTech Strategy

BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg

Rolling out a new online payments platform in 2025 seems to be a fool’s errand, for two reasons.

First, online payments are fraught with risk. They are a magnet for fraudsters of every ilk. They suffer under the burden of complex regulatory requirements. No vendor would ever be able to roll out a simple ‘minimum viable product’ version of online payments, as addressing these risks set a high bar for any vendor so inclined.

Second, the market is already full of competitors, especially in the US. From established players like Authorize.net to market leaders like Stripe, US businesses of all sizes already have a variety of online payment platforms to choose from.

Why then, would Zoho ever dip its toe into such murky online payments waters?

Understanding Zoho’s Product Strategy

Zoho offers dozens of applications for businesses of all sizes, from its flagship CRM offering to Zoho Books (competing with Intuit QuickBooks), Zoho Sign (facing off with DocuSign), and many others.

What Zoho’s products have that these various competitors do not is a single architected platform – enabling all of Zoho’s various apps to seamlessly integrate with each other. The apps also run on Zoho’s own cloud infrastructure, minimizing cloud costs while empowering Zoho to deliver world-class privacy across its application suite.

Zoho Payments, therefore, does not stand alone. Not only does it offer native payment capability with Zoho Books, Zoho Finance, and a range of other Zoho applications, it also integrates with several third-party applications via APIs.

It also takes advantage of modular Zoho capabilities that the company has built along the way for several of its applications – a key differentiator that competing products cannot offer.

In other words, Zoho Payments delivers the full spectrum of risk management, compliance, and security capabilities any payments solution needs right out of the gate.

How Zoho Competes

Today, Zoho Payments works in the US and India. In comparison, Authorize.net works only in the US and Canada, while Stripe also works in Europe and other parts of the world. BrainTree, PayPal’s enterprise payments platform, also offers multinational support.

Zoho Books, in fact, integrates with Authorize.net, Stripe, and several other payment platforms, enabling customers to pay with a credit card by clicking a link in their invoice.

The per-transaction pricing that these vendors offer is also comparable. True, some customers might choose Zoho Payments over some price difference, but any such savings are unlikely to overcome the established market presence of Zoho’s competitors.

To understand Zoho’s competitive strategy, therefore, it’s essential to step back and look at the larger picture.

Zoho Payments is but one element of a long-term strategy to roll out end-to-end fintech capabilities for businesses of all sizes. There’s no way to implement an end-to-end order-to-cash stack without payments as the keystone.

Zoho Payments is therefore an essential enabler of Zoho’s goal to move upmarket. The company has traditionally focused on the small office/home office segment (still enshrined in the company name) but has been gradually adding applications and other capabilities targeted at increasingly larger customers. Zoho Payments supports this strategy.

Take Zoho Books, for example. This application has long met the bookkeeping needs of small and midsize businesses. It integrates well with other apps like Zoho Expense and Zoho CRM – again, of particular use to small and midsize organizations.

To break into the enterprise market, however, Zoho must offer end-to-end capabilities like order-to-cash – capabilities that larger organizations have traditionally looked to their ERP platforms to provide.

Don’t think, therefore, of Zoho Payments competing head-to-head with Stripe (although it will). Instead, think of Payments as the keystone in Zoho’s end-to-end fintech strategy, competing head to head with ERP solutions – for small and midsize enterprises to start, with an eye toward larger enterprises over time.

The Intellyx Take

How likely is Zoho’s end-to-end upmarket fintech strategy to succeed? Looking at the competitors in the space – ERP vendors targeting particular industries as well as other mid-market ERP offerings – one of Zoho’s primary differentiators is its modular, cloud-centric offering.

Thirty or so years ago, ERP rose to prominence by replacing a mishmash of individual point applications that didn’t integrate well (or at all). ERP offered support for end-to-end processes like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay.

Today, and such integrated offerings are inflexible legacy tools that are difficult to customize and integrate.

Zoho’s offerings, on the other hand, are modular, easy to customize and integrate, and also run on the cloud. And the keystone holding up this end-to-end strategy? Zoho Payments.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Zoho is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this article.