The dental industry is embracing digital innovation, with practice management and patient engagement platforms becoming vital for modern clinics. From online appointment booking and automated treatment reminders to intra‑office messaging and patient feedback surveys, these solutions streamline workflows and enhance patient satisfaction. Yet one challenge remains for dental teams: delivering a seamless, secure payment experience—whether it’s collecting copays at the front desk or processing balances through a patient portal—all without forcing patients to leave the platform they trust.
Enter PayFac as a Service (PFaaS)
By embedding a fully compliant, end‑to‑end payment engine directly into your dental software, PFaaS lets practices accept in‑app payments on tablets, desktops, or mobile devices. Patients can pay treatment fees, membership plan subscriptions, and financing installments without ever navigating away, reducing abandoned payments and administrative overhead.
What is PayFac as a Service for Dental Software?
PayFac as a Service (PFaaS) is a modern payment facilitation model that enables dental software providers to embed and manage payments directly within their applications—without shouldering the full operational and regulatory responsibilities of becoming a registered payment facilitator. Rather than the SaaS provider maintaining each merchant account and certifications, your platform operates under a master merchant account administered by a trusted PFaaS partner like Clearent by Xplor.
For dental software, this means you can offer secure, seamless treatment fee collections and membership billing right in the same interface your clients use for scheduling, charting, and patient communications. Whether a patient is checking out on a chairside tablet, settling an invoice through your patient portal, or enrolling in a subscription‑based wellness plan, every transaction happens in‑app—eliminating extra logins and payment abandonment. Meanwhile, your PFaaS provider handles merchant onboarding, KYC/AML screening, PCI DSS compliance, tokenization of card data, risk monitoring, chargeback management, and settlement reconciliation.
What sets our PFaaS solution apart is its flexibility: we guide dental software teams through an integration path that meets your needs today—whether that’s an out-of-the-box hosted checkout page or a fully embedded solution—and then scale up or down on controls (underwriting, chargeback management, custom billing flows) as your business evolves. You get all the benefits of a turnkey payments engine plus the freedom to gradually assume more or less of the payment lifecycle without uprooting your technology.
Related Blog: What is PayFac as a Service?
6 Key Benefits of PayFac as a Service for Dental Software Providers
1. Reduced Complexity and Lower Costs
By leveraging a PayFac as a Service partner’s existing payments infrastructure, you eliminate the need to build and maintain your own merchant accounts, underwriting flows, and compliance processes. This dramatically cuts upfront development effort, ongoing maintenance, and the hidden costs of regulatory risk—letting you deliver payments functionality without expanding your technology or finance teams.
2. Faster Market Entry & Seamless Practice Onboarding
Traditional payment setups can add weeks or months to your launch timeline. With PayFac as a Service, dental software providers tap into a pre-built merchant onboarding and underwriting engine. New healthcare practices—or individual providers—can be approved and transacting within days, not quarters, ensuring your platform drives revenue from day one.
3. Scalability & Flexibility to Meet Dental Platforms Needs
As your customer base grows across specialties, geographies, or care models (telehealth vs. in-office), a PFaaS model scales instantly. Volume spikes—from busy seasons to a new dental office opening—are handled seamlessly by the PayFac as a Service provider’s risk engine and processing network. You stay focused on delivering new modules while payments scale in the background.
4. Put Your Brand Front and Center with White-Labeling
Embedding payments directly into your UI—complete with your logo, color palette, and patient portal—reinforces trust and consistency. Practices and patients never see third-party URLs or unfamiliar interfaces during checkout. Maintaining a fully branded experience not only deepens patient loyalty but also reduces drop-off at the point of payment.
5. More Time to Focus on Core Platform & Feature Innovation
Offloading merchant risk monitoring, chargeback management, and settlement reconciliation to your PayFac as a Service partner frees your product and engineering teams to innovate new dental software features. Rather than dedicating sprints to PCI compliance updates or building complex payment flows, you can focus your efforts on building core platform features.
6. Increased Payments Revenue Through Higher Capture Rates
By embedding payments directly into your dental software, you funnel more transactions through a single, optimized flow—minimizing leakage to alternative methods like standalone terminals or external invoicing portals.
Success Story: Dental Intelligence’s Automated Merchant Onboarding
Dental Intelligence is a leading end-to-end practice performance solution for dental providers. Their platform delivers actionable insights and automation to help practices increase production, boost visit volume, improve collections, and reduce administrative overhead—empowering dental teams to focus on patient care rather than manual reporting.
The Challenge
Before partnering with Clearent by Xplor, Dental Intelligence struggled with a manual and time-intensive payments onboarding process. They lacked an automated merchant boarding workflow, faced increasing overhead to maintain a non-automated solution, and encountered scalability roadblocks as they expanded their payment integrations.
The PayFac as a Service Solution
By leveraging Automated Onboarding one of Clearent’s PayFac as a Service a la carte solutions:
Dental Intelligence integrated a hosted application page directly into their signup flow, enabling new practices to complete merchant onboarding and terminal ordering in minutes.
The solution included built-in terminal deployment and hands-on integration support, eliminating back-and-forth with multiple vendors.
The Impact
Adopting Automated Onboarding with built-in terminal ordering and deployment drove dramatic results for Dental Intelligence’s users:
- 1,500% increase in processing volume per account
- 27% uplift in payment attachment rate
- 11% reduction in non-activated accounts
Moreover, merchants were operational in as little as 10 minutes, accelerating time to revenue and improving overall satisfaction.
Decision Factors for Dental Software Providers Considering PayFac as a Service
- Resource Availability: Building a full payment stack—PCI DSS certification, merchant underwriting, reconciliation, and compliance—requires specialized expertise and ongoing maintenance. A turnkey PFaaS solution lets your team focus on core dental features instead of payment infrastructure.
- Cost Considerations: Compare total cost of ownership: integration/setup fees, volume‑tier transaction pricing, gateway or switch charges, and add‑ons for chairside widgets or automated reminders. Under a shared master‑merchant model, you also cut per‑office underwriting and PCI audit expenses.
- Growth & Scalability: Dental platforms face seasonal peaks—orthodontic checkups and year‑end benefits rush. A PFaaS partner scales instantly under one master account, handling spikes and new revenue lines like membership programs without spinning up new merchant IDs.
- Risk & Compliance: PFaaS providers manage PCI DSS attestations, KYC/AML checks, and real‑time fraud monitoring, dramatically reducing your regulatory burden and operational risk.
- Patient Experience: Patients expect seamless, in‑app payments—on chairside tablets, in portals, or via mobile. Choose a PFaaS that supports card‑on‑file autopay and SMS/email payment links without redirects, boosting collections and trust.
How to Choose the Right PayFac as a Service Partner for Dental Software
When selecting a PFaaS provider for your dental platform, look for a partner that delivers turnkey payments tailored to dental workflows:
- Deep Dental Workflow Expertise: Proven integrations with practice management systems and experience handling treatment‑plan copays, recall membership programs, and insurance co‑pay collections.
- Developer‑Friendly API Integration: Clear, well‑documented endpoints that slot directly into your scheduling engine, charting module, patient portal, and reporting dashboards—minimizing customization effort and speeding up launch.
- Low‑Code / No‑Code Embeddable Widgets: Prebuilt connectors or visual builders that let you drop payment forms into chairside tablets, patient portals, or mobile apps in minutes—so you can ship payments without a heavy engineering lift.
- Customizable Dental Payment Workflows: Support for one‑time treatment payments, recurring wellness‑plan billing, deposit collections for sedation or surgical procedures, sliding‑scale fee arrangements, and automated SMS/email reminders aligned to appointment or insurance cycles.
- Rapid Practice & Patient Onboarding: Automated underwriting, KYC/AML screening, and secure card‑on‑file capture that get both dental offices and their patients transacting within minutes—eliminating weeks‑long setup delays.
- Enterprise‑Grade Security & Compliance: End‑to‑end encryption, tokenization of card data, real‑time fraud monitoring, chargeback management, and full PCI DSS certification—ensuring every transaction meets industry security standards.
- Attractive Revenue‑Sharing Models: Competitive transaction rates or referral incentives that allow you to capture more processing margin and reinvest in dental‑specific feature development.
Wrap-Up & Next Steps for Dental Software Teams
Adopting PayFac as a Service enables dental software platforms to revolutionize payment workflows with minimal effort and maximum return. By embedding merchant onboarding, compliance management, and transaction processing directly into your practice management and patient portal, you’ll simplify administration, speed up copay and balance collections, and offer a cohesive, branded checkout experience—whether at the chairside tablet or online. As your platform expands into group practices, membership‑based preventive care plans, or new service lines, a PFaaS model scales effortlessly under a single master account—handling seasonal spikes and growing transaction volumes without additional engineering or compliance burden.
Ready to transform your dental platform’s payments? Contact our team today to learn how PayFac as a Service can accelerate your time‑to‑revenue and unlock new efficiencies. Schedule a personalized demo and discover the difference streamlined, embedded payments can make for your platform.
by Clearent by Xplor
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First published: May 09 2025
Written by: Clearent by Xplor