You can't target what you can't see

How do I find ISVs to embed payments?

Most B2B data providers carry company firmographics: size, location, revenue band, and an SIC or NAICS industry code that rarely describes what a software vendor actually does. Very few carry any software firmographics, because the classification work is different. It means doing in-house analysis to identify which companies are software vendors at all, then describing what their products actually do.

For a payment team that gap is the whole problem. No externally bought-in industry code can do the work: a vertical SaaS vendor usually carries the code of the market it sells into — a restaurant POS vendor is coded as a restaurant — so filtering a general database for “software” returns a small and unrepresentative slice, and says nothing about which merchants sit behind each vendor. ISVWorld has developed its own technology and processes for this layer specifically, to be able to cover and profile ISVs and SaaS vendors globally.

The practical effect is that the list stops being the vendors you have already heard of — the ones with visible marketplaces, conference presence or an existing referral, which is the same list every competitor is working. You start from the software market itself and narrow to the vendors where the monetization opportunities sit.

What software firmographics add — and what a payment team reads in them

Company firmographics describe the business. Software firmographics describe the software. Six layers, on every vendor record — and each one answers a different payments question:

• Software categories and functions — what the product does, in a taxonomy built for software rather than borrowed from general industry codes. For payments: whether money is already part of the workflow — invoicing, booking, dispatch, checkout — and so whether an embed is natural or forced.
• Verticals and target segments — which markets a vendor sells into, and which customer sizes it is built for. For payments: the merchant base you would ultimately be processing for, and the ticket size and volume profile that comes with it.
• Technologies and cloud platforms — what the product is built on, including stack signals drawn from multiple sources (hiring activity, tech profiles in 3rd party directories and more) rather than only from what is publicly detectable on a website. For payments: integration effort, and whether the vendor’s stack fits the way you ship.
• Marketplace presence — where the product is listed and transacted, which also signals the platform it runs on: AWS Marketplace, Microsoft AppSource, Salesforce AppExchange, Intuit, Sage. For payments: distribution reach, and the billing rails that may already sit between you and the merchant.
• Partner and technology ecosystems — who a vendor integrates with and builds on, whether or not the relationship has been formally registered. For payments: which processors, gateways or PayFacs a vendor already works with — and, more usefully, which have none.
• Payment and monetisation profile — if money moves through the product. For payments: the qualifying layer. Referral, revenue share or fully embedded — it separates a displacement conversation from a greenfield one.

Together these run to 600–1,000 software-specific datapoints per company, alongside growth and intent signals tracked from daily news monitoring. For a payment team they turn “which software companies exist” into “which ones carry the merchants I want, and which one to call first.”