Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 53. Published 23 October 2026. Guest: Patrick O'Donnell, Global Commercial Director Payments at Phorest. Host: Lars Markull.
Intro
Lars Markull: Phorest is 20 years old, but payments has been part of the business for only the last five years. Sounds like a long time? Well, my explanation is that you first have to build software your customers generally rely on and earn enough trust to put a financial product in front of them. And when Phorest started, there was no vertical SaaS playbook to follow.
Pat O'Donnell looks after payments and financial services at Phorest, the Irish software company that hair and beauty salons, med spas and aesthetics clinics run their business on. Phorest started in Dublin, grew across Ireland and the UK, then Finland, the DACH region, the Netherlands and Australia, and now counts North America as one of its biggest markets.
Pat spent his career in regulated financial services at Citibank and Mastercard. Phorest is his first role on the other side of the fence. We get into why payments arrived at Phorest 15 years in and why it came out of the US business almost by accident, and how Pat's financial services team works with the product and engineering teams to decide what gets built.
Pat also explains why their lending launch had nothing to do with customers asking for it, what salon owners actually use the money for, and what is coming next with embedded payroll and treasury. His framing for all of it: payments is not a strategy. It enables everything else.
My name is Lars Markull, and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review, a newsletter, podcast and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. If you're working on an embedded finance project, newsletter subscribers can book a free intro call with me to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners. You're not subscribed yet? Then head over to embeddedfinancereview.com, subscribe, and then use the link in the newsletter or simply reply to any edition.
And this edition is sponsored by Okoora. Whether you're running your company's finances or offering financial services to your customers, the challenge is the same: connecting banks, providers and complex financial workflows. Okoora brings it all together in one connected financial system. Businesses use Okoora to send and receive payments, exchange currencies, and manage cash and risk. Banks and fintechs use Okoora's infrastructure to launch new financial services without starting from scratch. Learn more at okoora.com. That's O-K-double O-R-A.com.
And now, let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Pat, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Patrick O'Donnell: Hi Lars, thanks for having me on. I'm sitting in my front room in slightly sunny Dublin in Ireland at the moment, Friday afternoon. So yeah, looking forward to our chat.
Lars Markull: Same here. If I'm looking outside, Berlin is also a sunny day today. So looking forward to the weekend and also looking forward to our chat. We connected already some time ago, I think it was at the time you joined Phorest in your role, and we have kept in touch. Looking forward now to dive a little bit deeper into the topic. With your background, you have spent 25 plus years in financial services. You've seen quite a bit. Now you're responsible for fintech or payment or financial products at a vertical software as a service company. Maybe to give it a simple and easy start question: what do you think is the right time for a software business to get into payments?
When a software business should get into payments
Patrick O'Donnell: Thanks. And thanks for aging me there, Lars, as well. I appreciate that. I'll tell everybody I started work when I was ten.
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I don't think there's any right time, but if you're software-driven and you're customer-driven, the first part you've got to do is build out your software, make sure your core workflows work and make sense and are relevant to your client base. You need to understand your customer and their ecosystem and their workflows end to end before you can get too complex and start adding payments in. Now, that may not hold true for every SaaS company, but definitely from a Phorest perspective, it took a long time for Phorest to build up the capabilities it had from a software perspective, moving through to bookings, all the way out to deposit checks, what that all looked like from a customer perspective. And then I think once you know that, that's when you start seeing the opportunity to start building out the payments piece.