Why Mid-Market Payments Are Still Broken in 2026
Enterprise companies have treasury teams. Small businesses use Stripe. The mid-market? Still drowning in spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and disconnected systems.
Customer Success Lead
There's a $4 trillion problem hiding in plain sight.
Enterprise companies have dedicated treasury teams, sophisticated ERP integrations, and armies of accountants. Small businesses swipe cards with Square or drop in a Stripe checkout. But the mid-market — businesses doing $10M to $500M in revenue — are stuck in a strange purgatory.
The Mid-Market Gap
Walk into any mid-market auto dealer (as NADA has documented), multi-location retailer, or regional distributor. You'll find the same story:
- Manual reconciliation eating 20+ hours per week
- Disconnected systems that don't talk to each other
- Payment data trapped in one silo, AR data in another
- Finance teams copy-pasting between spreadsheets
It's not that these businesses chose bad software. It's that the payments industry forgot they existed.
Why This Happened
Stripe, Adyen, and the modern payment processors built beautiful APIs for developers. But mid-market businesses don't have developer teams. They have:
- A DMS that's been running since 2015
- An ERP that "works fine, don't touch it"
- QuickBooks or NetSuite bolted on the side
- Three different merchant accounts from three different eras
The developer-first payment revolution passed them by.
What Actually Needs to Change
Mid-market businesses don't need another payment processor. They need embedded payments that:
- Plug into existing software — not replace it
- Automate reconciliation — not require more of it
- Unify AR and payments — not create another silo
- Lower processing costs — because margins matter
The technology exists. The integrations are possible. The industry just hasn't prioritized it.
The Path Forward
At Anchorbase, we're building for this exact gap. Modern payments infrastructure that respects the systems mid-market businesses already use — while eliminating the manual work that's holding them back.
No rip-and-replace. No developer required. Just payments that actually work with your business.
Interested in seeing how this works for your business? Request a demo and we'll show you exactly how much time and money you're leaving on the table.