The hotel payment processing experience is ready for a shakeup. Improving payment processing in hotels has been a major barrier for independent operators, and yet the closer payment processes are to a business’ core systems, the more benefits they provide operators. Hotels have embraced the value of integrated payment processing, which allows merchants to integrate their capabilities into a hotel’s point-of-sale systems, but this still necessitates a digital “handshake” between service providers to process a simple payment. The next evolution of this offering is embedded payments, which are helping independent operators control costs and simplify guest purchases.