Bright, the UK and Ireland software group behind BrightPay, BrightBooks, and a suite of tax and compliance tools, has partnered with Unipaas to embed payments into BrightBooks, its cloud accounting product. The integration adds a pay button to invoices issued from BrightBooks, letting end customers pay by card, wallet, open banking, or direct debit. The payment then reconciles back into the accounting workflow automatically.
Bright is completing a back-office suite
Bright is less well known internationally than Sage or Xero, but it occupies a meaningful position in the UK and Irish SMB market. The group is built around BrightPay, one of the most widely used payroll products in Ireland, and has expanded over the years into accounts production, practice management, tax, company secretarial, and bookkeeping through BrightBooks, which was previously branded as Surf Accounts.
The distinctive part of Bright's model is its distribution. Most of its products are sold to accountants, who then deploy them with their SMB clients. That makes Bright structurally different from Xero or QuickBooks, which sell directly to SMBs and treat accountants as a partner channel.
Adding payments was the obvious missing piece in an otherwise complete back-office suite. It also changes the economics. A pure software subscription becomes a transaction-based revenue stream tied to the amount of business the customer does, which is one of the underlying shifts behind many embedded payments deals in vertical SaaS.
Unipaas keeps choosing accounting
On the provider side, Unipaas is London-based and FCA-licensed, and was founded in Israel in 2020. They sit in a crowded market for embedded payments infrastructure, competing with giants like Stripe and Adyen, and newcomers like Rootline.
However, it seems Unipaas has chosen its vertical and is successful within it. Unipaas has previously signed Capium, IRIS Pay, and Nomi Pay, all accounting-software platforms in the UK. Rather than competing on horizontal breadth, Unipaas appears to be building vertical depth in accounting specifically, with onboarding flows, reconciliation logic, and platform features tuned to how accounting tools actually operate. Earlier in May, Unipaas was also selected for Mastercard's Start Path Acceptance programme, which provides external validation of that direction of travel.
My Take
The UK and Ireland accounting market is quite an active embedded finance battleground in Europe. In the last few months, Dext launched payments with Airwallex, HSBC embedded Sage's accounting tools inside its business banking app, Tide built accounting natively on the same Sage infrastructure, and Xero has announced multiple payment partners. Therefore, the Bright and Unipaas partnership is the latest entry in a market where every meaningful player is trying to become the financial operating system for SMBs.
The natural next layer after payments is lending. Unipaas already has a Capital product, and Bright now has both the data and the rails that make embedded lending underwritable.
