Payments Don’t Move Without People: How Backpack and OMBX Build With a People-First Mindset

When people think of business-to-business payments, they think about moving money: ACH rails, wires, instant payouts, the latest real-time networks. While that’s all valid, it’s also just the surface. At Backpack, we believe something deeper: Payments are people.

It might sound sentimental or even cliche, but it’s true. Every dollar that changes hands represents a decision made by someone - often many people. Behind every payment is a relationship, a workflow, a set of expectations, a promise. That’s why at Backpack, we don't build just to move money. We build to create trust, to orchestrate outcomes and to empower the humans behind the transaction.

Money movement isn’t where the payments journey begins - it’s where it pays off. For payment providers and banks exploring Banking as a Service, that’s a shift worth internalizing.

Payments Are a Platform

Here’s an interesting idea: The wire or ACH file you send is just the final artifact of a successful payment lifecycle. Everything that comes before it is the platform that makes it possible.

If you’re building or operating in B2B payments and you’re only thinking about ledgers and bank accounts, you’re missing the point. To really win, your platform needs to build for people - because it’s people who approve, initiate, receive and reconcile the end transaction.

For us at Backpack, that is the bursars and financial aid professionals who are often the unsung heroes working tirelessly to facilitate a noble mission by educating the next generation of leaders. In the context of a framework I use a lot, the job is not to simply make a payment, it’s to do everything we can to facilitate and provide access to education.

Moving money is an important but small part of that.

1. Put Trust at the Center

Money is a language of trust. When a business sends money through your system, they’re saying: We believe this is safe. We believe this will work. We believe you are who you say you are. And if that trust ever breaks, it's hard - sometimes impossible - to recover.

That’s why your brand matters. Not your logo. Not your font. But your emotional presence. Are you warm? Are you clear? Do your users feel supported, understood and protected?

We learned this lesson quickly at Backpack. Scholarship recipients are often 17- or 18-year-old students handling thousands of dollars of financial aid for the first time. On the other end, administrators of scholarships are often volunteers doing important work at foundations or not-for-profit organizations, where finance and payments aren’t their core competency, either.

If our user experience felt cold or our dashboards seemed confusing, we’d lose them and risk the mission in the process. So, we made warmth and clarity a core part of our design DNA.

Payment trust starts with product feel. Build a platform that people want to use, not just one they need to use.

2. Make the Workflow Feel Magical

The best payments platforms don’t just move money, they transform workflows.

Too often, B2B payments sit on top of broken or heavily manual processes. Prior to Backpack, a lot of our partners dealt with thousands of unstandardized submissions - PDFs, emails, paper mail - which resulted in hundreds of hours of manual work to sort through. At the end of all of it, a paper check! This just led to more manual processing and reconciliation.

This doesn’t just create inefficiency, it destroys any ability to deliver a seamless and trusted experience across the payment lifecycle. Students don’t exactly know what’s going on because it is impossible to trigger event-based communications from manual, unstandardized workflows. This leads to even more manual work, often the dreaded “where is my paper check” phone call or email.

What if the experience of sending a payment felt like submitting a well-designed form - intuitive, guided and foolproof? What if recipients had self-service tools to track, update or even reroute their funds? What if everyone, from the payment provider to the student to university staff, could see exactly where money is, and why?

This is the magic of experience-forward payment design. Payments aren’t a single action - they’re a series of touchpoints. Each one is a chance to delight, reassure or de-risk.
 

3. Build Risk and Compliance into the Flow

Here’s a hard truth: No amount of delightful UX matters if your risk and compliance infrastructure is weak. But the good news is that great risk and compliance don’t have to feel like red tape. They can actually reinforce trust and clarity.

Here is another truth that is particularly true for B2B payments. Sometimes purposeful friction can be a good thing - and even a feature. We’ve heard stories where some CFOs have stopped the move to online payments because they like having to physically sign a paper check, which pushes them to really check why the payment is going out.

At Backpack, we build compliance into the product in a purposeful way that protects our partners and stakeholders. For example, approval workflows and checks and balances can be implemented as workflows themselves, improving the security of the process while also improving efficiency.

We also work very closely with our bank partner, OMB Bank and their embedded finance division OMBX, to build an array of internal tools, controls and alerts purpose-built for our use case. Because we have a very specific and often linear payment lifecycle, we can build tooling that highlights and prevents behavior that exists outside of what we expect. We can also surface those to our partners, kind of like when your bank or credit card prompts you to confirm if a transaction was you or not.

The result? We keep fraud out and trust high, helping our partners feel protected, not policed. Security isn’t a feature you bolt on. It’s a feeling you embed.

4. Communicate Constantly, Transparently and Kindly

Communication isn’t just a support function - it’s part of the payment experience. And it’s too often overlooked. What if your users never had to ask, “Where’s my money?”

A truly people-first payment platform sends proactive updates. Explains delays with empathy. Guides users through every stage of the process. Doesn’t make them dig through PDFs or guess which email is real. This kind of clarity builds emotional safety and saves teams hours of reactive support.

We obsess over this at Backpack. When a sponsor sends $500k in scholarships, they want to know those funds are in motion, not in limbo. And when a student needs to buy food or pay for housing next week, they don’t want to hear “it’s in the mail” - they want a real timeline.

Every time we communicate clearly, we create a feeling of confidence, trust and security.
 

Bringing It All Together

If you build a platform where:

• Trust is earned and visible,
• Experiences are thoughtful and intuitive,
• Risk is managed with care and clarity,
• And communication is open and empathetic...

…then the money movement becomes the natural conclusion. Not the operational question mark.

The reality for all fintech companies is that, to be able to deliver on the above, you need a bank partner that understands all of this. Not just another API. Not just another NACHA file processor. A partner that embeds the human element into their BaaS offering and works closely together with you to facilitate the entire payment lifecycle that best fits your end partners.

We are lucky to partner with OMB Bank in this regard. Backpack was their first fintech partner and together we have worked closely to build systems, processes and—most importantly—the relationships needed to succeed together.
 

Where This Leads

It’s easy to optimize for throughput. But the future of B2B payments belongs to platforms that optimize for human throughput, the emotional and operational journey that every dollar takes.

This is why, at Backpack, we say payments are people. Because it’s the people - sending, receiving, checking, stressing, reconciling - who define the real success of any platform. Not the number of transactions per second.

When you remember that, everything changes. You stop building to move money and start building to move relationships, reputations and outcomes.
 

OMB and its affiliates do not provide legal, tax or accounting advice. You should consult your legal and/or tax advisors before making any financial decision.