Paysafe and FastSpring launch co-branded Merchant of Record solution

The partnership lets digital-goods sellers offload global tax, compliance and chargeback duties to a single co-branded payments stack.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sun, 6 September 2026

Multiple workstations with monitors and chairs in a blue-lit control room, facing a large video wall displaying digital circuit diagrams and code.

Paysafe (NYSE: PSFE), the London-headquartered payments platform, has teamed up with FastSpring to launch a co-branded Merchant of Record (MoR) solution aimed at software, gaming, AI tools and other digital-goods businesses seeking to expand internationally without building out the operational infrastructure that cross-border commerce typically demands.

Under the arrangement, FastSpring's existing MoR infrastructure is packaged alongside Paysafe's payments network. The combined offering takes on legal responsibility as the seller of record, absorbing obligations around VAT and sales-tax calculation and remittance, regional payment localisation, regulatory compliance and chargeback management. For a digital-first business whose core competence lies in product development rather than revenue-operations plumbing, that offloading can represent a meaningful reduction in time-to-market for new geographies.

What the partnership actually delivers

Paysafe reported annualised transactional volume of $167 billion in 2025, processed across approximately 2,800 employees in 12 countries. FastSpring, which says it powers over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions annually, has operated in the MoR space for more than two decades, working with technology companies across gaming, subscription software and mobile applications. The pairing is therefore less a technology merger than a distribution play: Paysafe gains a credentialled MoR layer to sell into its existing merchant base, while FastSpring gains access to Paysafe's international payments rails and iGaming-focused client network.

Bob Legters, Chief Product Officer at Paysafe, framed the proposition in straightforward terms: "Businesses want to focus on building great products and serving customers, not navigating the complexities of global commerce. Together with FastSpring, we're making it easier for digital businesses to reach customers worldwide through a trusted merchant of record framework."

The initial target verticals are gaming, software and digital content, sectors where digital distribution means compliance exposure is global from day one, even for small teams.

The convergence read-across: payments infrastructure as growth enabler

The MoR model sits at an interesting intersection for Disrupts readers. As AI-native software companies proliferate, many are shipping commercial products within months of founding, often to customers across dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously. The administrative overhead of managing VAT obligations in the EU, sales-tax nexus rules in US states, and payment-method preferences across Southeast Asia has historically required either a dedicated revenue-operations team or a costly enterprise resource planning integration. MoR services effectively compress that overhead into a single contractual relationship.

This creates a structural tailwind for the MoR category broadly. The growth of agentic software products and AI-powered SaaS tools means more companies are reaching global scale faster than the traditional enterprise compliance stack can accommodate. Paysafe's move signals that established payments platforms, which have historically competed on acquiring relationships and card-processing margins, are now repositioning as full-stack global commerce enablers. That shift puts them in more direct competition with players such as Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, which have built their propositions almost entirely around the MoR model for software and AI businesses.

For macro investors, the story is partly about margin mix. MoR services carry higher value-added revenue per transaction than vanilla card acquiring, because the provider is absorbing legal and compliance risk rather than simply routing payment data. As Paysafe's core iGaming and e-commerce verticals face regulatory headwinds in several markets, adding a higher-margin MoR line through a partnership structure rather than an acquisition keeps balance-sheet risk contained while broadening the product surface area. Whether the co-branded model can generate meaningful volume uplift, or whether it remains a niche add-on, will depend on how aggressively Paysafe's sales teams push the combined offering into its existing merchant base.