Glossary

June 18, 2021

Payment Orchestration

Payment orchestration, not to be confused with payment gateway, payment hub, or payment switch, gives merchants complete control over their payment stack. An acquirer agnostic platform gives merchants the ability to access to the most appropriate payment methods, monitor transaction in real time, use smart routing, have a centralized reconciliation, and much more.

Payment orchestration allows for complete control of your payment stack. It is a technical layer that consolidates all aspects of payments. Meaning you can have access to multiple payment methods; use transaction routing with conversion boosting features such as cascading and failover; consolidate reconciliation and settlements; monitor transactions in real time to avoid false positives; mitigate risk; tokenize customer payment data; and more all in one place.

Payment orchestration is a technical layer that sits between the merchant and the payment service providers. It allows for payment agnostic connections, meaning the merchant can connect to any payment service provider or acquirer and get the best rates. It also allows for integration of local or alternative payment methods, allowing business to target market individually and increase turnover. All payments are handled from one API and managed centrally, giving the merchant a bird's-eye view over all payments. It can also be filtered to provide in-depth information regarding a payment service provider or an individual jurisdiction.

Connectivity: with a provider agnostic payment orchestration platform you can connect to as many payment providers as you like, connecting to international and local payment methods, allowing your business to expand into new markets and keep up with the payment trends.

Development burden: It takes personnel, money and time to develop, and manage, different payment integrations separately. With payment orchestration, you choose who you want to connect with and they provide the connection.

Uncentralized or incompatible analytics: Each PSP has its own analytics tool, this makes it difficult and time-consuming for merchants to gain valuable insight from their payment data payment (e.g. total volume, number of payments, average ticket size, percentage of refunds, acceptance rates, etc.). With Payment orchestration, all data is stored in one place and in the same format, making it simple for users to analyze.

Payment routing: You’ll have to create your own system of rules if you wish to direct transactions to the most appropriate PSP. With payment orchestration, you can create routing rules quickly and easily and use fallback and cascading to increase conversion rates.

Time-to-Market: There is a lot of dependency between back-office systems and your payment stack (e.g. Billing; ERP; CRM; ERP), and the excessive system coupling may lead to the inability to deploy new services at a fast pace. With one API, you can integrate to new payment service providers and acquirers quickly and efficiently without having to worry about your backend systems.

In using a payment orchestration platform, your connections to payment providers and acquirers are made and maintained through a third party. It is the payment orchestration platform’s responsibility to ensure that PCI standards are met and are compliant. This therefore places the majority burden on the payment orchestration platform and not on the merchant.

Payments Explained: What is Payment Orchestration?

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