Mercoa

Mercoa enables any B2B platform to offer accounts payable/BillPay to their customers

Founder & CEO

Bill.com

Lead for Instant Transfer line of business: Grew TPV from $300M to $2B in one year.
Built embedded BillPay - Left to pursue this opportunity externally.

Payments Product Manager

Simplemnt

Bootstrapped an enterprise customer onboarding platform to $100k ARR

Co-Founder

Magento, an Adobe Company

Migrated Magento's 1000+ SI partners to the Adobe Partner ecosystem

Product Manager, Growth

Grew Magento Cloud from 20% of new revenue to 80% of all new revenue in one year

Business Operations & Strategy - Cloud

Talkdesk

Customer Success Manager

Gusto!

- Added $5M in annual revenue with a team of 8

SDR Team Lead

- Grew Inbound Sales team from 5 to 18 people 
- Increased close rate by 20% through experimentation

Inbound Sales Team Lead

Inbound Sales Representative

Root Systems, Inc

Raised venture capital from Plug & Play ventures for an AgTech IoT startup and launched pilots with several companies

Cisco Systems

Launched Cisco Project Marketplace to identify/retain top intern talent and reduce turn around time for full time offer letters

IT Analyst

Wolstein Entrepreneur Scholars at The Ohio State University

-Cofounded a capstone course for the Entrepreneurship minor at OSU to allow undergraduate Entrepreneurship minor students to put theory to practice and create viable businesses
     -Students are required to take a 2 semester long course with the 1st semester being held in a group study setting.  
     -The 2nd semester is a time for students to take their businesses and bring them to market while writing a thesis about the leadership experiences gained.
     -Completion of the capstone will earn a student a "Distinction in Entrepreneurship" on their diploma

-Responsible for:
  -Creating website for the Wolstein Scholars
  -Establishing the Wolstein brand across OSU campus as well as throughout Columbus 
  -Collaborating with other entrepreneurial groups to help grow Columbus' entrepreneurial network

Co-founder

FirstService PGP Valuation

-Aggregate data pertaining to commercial real estate in order to conduct cost approach, sales comparison approach, and income capitalization approach to value commercial real estate
-Created and edited appraisal reports meant for clients
-Clients include: Red Capital, Huntington bank, First National Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Key Bank

Valuation Intern

At Mercoa, we're on a mission to empower any B2B platform to offer accounts payable and bill pay services to their customers. 

I am passionate about learning, collaborating, and helping others in the fintech space. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to learn more about Mercoa, the accounts payable opportunity, or fintech trends.

Your vendor onboarding playbook was written by a legacy BPO and it shows.

Even large, well-funded platforms with solid AP products fall short. Not because of pricing. Not because of issuing.  But because their vendor onboarding experience is broken. 

Virtual cards are a great way to monetize payouts. But without the right infrastructure to enroll suppliers, most spend defaults back to ACH or check; leaving platforms to earn a fraction of what they should. 

To patch the gap, many teams turn to legacy providers like Priority or FIS to onboard their customer's suppliers for them.

Here’s the truth: these providers make more when your vendor experience is awful. 

They force you to use their payment methods.

They control the vendor relationship.

And they get a kickback while vendors are stuck clicking phishing-style emails, logging into portals that look like Windows 98, and waiting two weeks for a support reply.

That’s not vendor enablement. That’s vendor abandonment.

Why build a polished AP product and then handed the most critical step to a third party that doesn’t care about your customer experience?

If you're serious about monetizing payouts you need to own the vendor experience. Not outsource it. 

You need infrastructure that matches your product, your brand, and your upside.

Your margins are buried under someone else’s onboarding form. Dig them out.

Sai Arora

Founder & CEO @ Mercoa | Embedded AP/AR Payments for B2B platforms

Love this take by Ernest Rolfson on the state of the AP/AR market. 

Many of his points mirror my experience at BILL. 

I always joked that the best exit for BILL was to be acquired by an accounting platform. Just owning the payment pipes is begging to be ripped and replaced. 

Now, it seems like the opportunity for BILL to find a home that actually makes sense has gotten much smaller. Even an issuer exit like Corpay isn’t in the cards given their recent acquisition of AvidXchange, Inc.  

Regardless, this news is great for vertical saas platforms building next gen all-in-one solutions. The market has spoken: the one stop shop solution for back office finance is here to stay.

CEO/Founder. Expert in Embedded Finance and AP B2B Payments.

The $2.5 Billion Deal That Just Killed the Standalone Fintech Model

Congrats Prashant Gandhi and Aharon Levine!   Much love from Chris Wyatt and I.   Excited to see what is next!

Xero's acquisition of Melio proves something Finexio has been saying for years: the best-of-breed payments era is dead.

While everyone debates whether Xero overpaid, they're missing the point. This deal represents the moment when accounting platforms decided to stop playing nice with fintech integrations and start eating their partners instead.

The numbers tell the brutal story. Melio burns $91 million in cash annually but commanded a 13x revenue multiple. BILL generates $317 million in free cash flow yet trades at 3.5x revenue. The market has spoken: integration beats profitability every time.

The office of the CFO has fundamentally changed. Finance teams are done juggling multiple logins, reconciling data across platforms, and managing relationships with six different fintech vendors. They want one integrated workflow where they can see cash flow, approve invoices, execute payments, and analyze spend without ever leaving their accounting system.

BILL exemplifies everything wrong with the old playbook. Their growth strategy depended on piggybacking off accounting platforms. Intuit kicked them out of QuickBooks last year. Now Xero just armed itself with a homegrown competitor. BILL went from two major distribution channels to zero in eighteen months.

The most damning part? BILL had the chance to acquire Melio for $1.9 billion in late 2023. They were in advanced talks. Then their stock dropped 16% when news leaked, and management got spooked. They walked away to appease quarterly earnings instead of securing their strategic future.

That decision will go down as one of the most expensive examples of short-term thinking in fintech history.

Xero understood what BILL missed: in winner-take-all markets, you either own the capabilities that define your customer experience, or someone else owns them and competes against you. Partnership agreements mean nothing when platforms decide to capture more value themselves.

The financial software companies that will dominate won't have the best individual payment processing or AP automation. They'll have the most comprehensive, integrated financial experiences. The standalone fintech layer is being systematically eliminated by platforms with deeper pockets and stronger customer relationships.

The embedded payments trend is accelerating. We're entering an era where financial software companies must own the entire workflow or risk becoming feature requests. The days of profitable fintech businesses sitting between accounting platforms and end users are numbered.

BILL learned this lesson the hard way. The question is whether other standalone fintech companies will adapt quickly enough to avoid the same fate.

What other payments categories will get absorbed by accounting platforms next?

I'm constantly surprised at just how archaic and manual B2B underwriting is. Love what Pranjal Daga and the Accend team are doing to modernize the industry and bring folks out of the finance Stone Age.

🚨 We rebuilt credit underwriting from the ground up. Introducing Accend 2.0 👇

Underwriting hasn’t changed much since 1999:
→ You request borrower financials
→ They send partial docs, maybe a week later
→ Your team manually spreads the statements
→ And eventually… someone writes a memo

The process is slow, messy, and quietly burning out your best analysts.

Accend 2.0 changes that. It’s our most ambitious release yet, designed to help financial institutions modernize how they collect, spread, and analyze financial data for underwriting.

In one platform, you can:
📥 Collect financials through ACCEND LINK — borrowers connect ERP systems or upload statements, no chasing
📊 Spread financials with speed and precision — AI handles the heavy lifting, and our analysts ensure auditability and accuracy
🧠 Generate credit memos in minutes — complete with business summaries, peer benchmarks, and financial health analysis
🚨 Get proactive alerts — Accend flags reconciliation errors, volatility spikes, abnormal ratios and a dozen more checks automatically

No more email chains titled “Q2 financials - FINAL_v3.pdf”
No more reviewing 50 line items just to find one red flag

Accend is the new operating layer for credit data — built for modern lenders who want to move faster without compromising risk.

And we believe this is how underwriting should work in 2025.

🎥 Watch the product demo below to see it in action.

Want to test and see it on your own data?
Message me to get started.

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