Money20/20 Vegas 2026: NMI's Steven Pinado on the Evolution of Embedded Payments

Quick Summary

As the payments landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, the demand for flexible, white-labelled infrastructure has never been higher. Steven Pinado of NMI explains at Money20/20 Vegas 2026 how the company acts as the essential plumbing for the industry, enabling software companies and banks to offer seamless payment experiences under their own brands.

How does NMI function within the payments ecosystem?

NMI operates as an embedded payments platform, providing the underlying infrastructure that connects a front-end point of sale or interface through to authorisation, payout, and disbursement. The company is purposefully white-labelled, meaning it remains invisible to the end consumer while powering the services of channel partners. These partners typically include software companies, banks, and independent sales organisations (ISOs) that want to offer payment acceptance without building the entire stack from scratch.

What does the integration of Dwolla bring to the platform?

The addition of Dwolla technology represents a logical extension of the NMI platform. According to Steven Pinado, the acquisition brought in a tech-forward payout and distribution capability, underpinned by a proprietary ledger. This has significantly accelerated NMI's ability to deliver complex financial movements. Key benefits include:

• Enhanced in-house capabilities for ACH, RTP, and FedNow.
• Reduced reliance on third-party partners for account to account modalities.
• A more integrated experience for distribution partners and their underlying merchants.
• The onboarding of a specialised team of experts to manage these sophisticated payment rails.

Why is payment modality choice becoming a priority for merchants?

Access to various payment methods is becoming easier, and NMI focuses on providing the right transaction routing and back-end authorisation for individual payments. This allows merchants to optimise their operations based on specific business needs. Steven Pinado notes that merchants can now choose modalities based on customer utility, transaction cost, speed, or certainty of funds. As payments become more deeply embedded in everyday software, account to account (A2A) options provide the flexibility required for merchants to offer genuine choice to their customers, which is expected to grow as a total percentage of the payment mix.

What is the future of transaction routing and agentic commerce?

The industry is moving toward a state of increased diversity in pathing and transaction types that fit individual use cases. Steven Pinado highlights the emergence of agentic commerce as another layer of consumer and merchant choice. While the timeline for widespread adoption remains fluid, the goal is to make transactions more seamless. For service providers, delivering this level of choice increases technical complexity, but it ultimately benefits the business by creating a more embedded and frictionless environment for the end user.

FF NEWS TAKE:

NMI is clearly moving beyond simple gateway services to become a comprehensive orchestration layer. By bringing real-time payment capabilities like FedNow and RTP in-house through the Dwolla integration, they are addressing the growing merchant demand for cost-effective account to account transfers. As agentic commerce begins to take shape, the ability to route transactions dynamically based on cost and speed will likely become the new standard for embedded finance providers.