Enpay CTO on Embedding Payment Fintech Inside Vertical SaaS
Haruhiko Tano, co-founder and CTO of enpay, explains how they built a payment-embedded vertical SaaS for Japan’s childcare market and why the model beats pure SaaS on churn and ARPU.
- a16z’s 2022 thesis: SaaS companies adding fintech see ARPU increase 2–5x; Battery Ventures data shows payment fintech carries the highest multiples within the fintech category.
- Enpay found that cash collection at nurseries involves a long tail of manual work — chasing late payers, coin-counting bank runs, reconciliation, receipts, and accounting entries — validated across 10+ nursery interviews.
- Japan has roughly 36,000 nurseries but the market will shrink with the declining birthrate; enpay’s expansion path runs through cram schools, tutoring, and eventually large installment categories like utilities, insurance, and rent.
- Partnership with GMO Payment Gateway was chosen partly for convenience-store payment support, which acts as a safety net for parents without credit cards or LINE accounts.
- Building merchant enrollment and fund-flow management from scratch is impractical for startups; enpay uses payment APIs and domain experts (hired on a part-time basis) to navigate PCI DSS, fund-transfer regulations, and the difference between “collection agency” and “fund transfer” licensing.
- Enpay’s API is now live with six SaaS partners that have strong vertical workflow features but lack a payment layer; network effects from this partner mesh are expected to create switching costs.
- After Series A, enpay grew from 4–5 full-time staff to roughly 30 in one year and is actively hiring for SLG-focused go-to-market roles to enter new verticals.
2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube
