Businesses have spent years investing in systems designed to determine whether a payment is legitimate. Fewer have invested in ensuring that a legitimate payment actually arrives.

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Just 13% of firms use payment guarantees, despite the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Payment Guarantee Gap: Why Adoption Lags Despite Perceived Value,” a collaboration with Plaid, finding in October that 76% of firms expected a moderate or significant positive impact on their business outcomes from a payment guarantee, and 95% expected at least some positive impact, with none predicting a negative one.

Implementing a new financial technology can introduce costs and complexity before its benefits become measurable, the report showed. Integration concerns were cited by 74% of firms, while 64% questioned guarantee fees relative to expected benefits. Another 59% reported an unclear return on investment.

Many firms have yet to establish a viable baseline for comparison of that ROI. A company that measures payment failures only through direct write-offs may underestimate their full economic impact. Conversely, a company with low failure rates and inexpensive recovery processes may find guarantees difficult to justify.

That makes targeted deployment potentially more attractive than universal coverage, particularly for payment flows where failures create disproportionate operational costs.

The economic opportunity is not simply fewer failed payments. It is reducing the operational burden that payment uncertainty creates throughout the business. A guarantee fee might appear expensive when compared exclusively with historical payment losses.

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