Get Forward Alternatives & Competitors

Stripe is the most directly named competitor. Lloyd told Latka that approximately half of Forward's clients upgraded from Stripe to Forward, and that Stripe's standard published rate of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents is the baseline from which Forward targets a 2 to 3 times improvement in take rate for the software platform. These figures reflect Lloyd's characterization of Stripe's pricing as stated in the interview and are not independently confirmed by Stripe.

Lloyd also referenced legacy point-of-sale players NCR, founded around 1905 and now part of a successor entity, and Micros, now owned by Oracle, as the duopoly that Bypass displaced in the live events market. Those companies were not described as current competitors to Forward. Global Payments, TSYS, Adyen, and PayPal were mentioned by Lloyd as part of the broader payments processing landscape but were not characterized as direct competitors to Forward's current business. Evolve Bank, Unit, and Blue Ridge Bank were referenced by Latka in the context of recent regulatory and compliance issues in the banking-as-a-service space, but Lloyd did not characterize any of them as competitors.