A Holistic View On Payment Orchestration 💡
If we look at the evolution of the payment gateway (2000-2025), I see three major versions: from basic (1.0), to advanced (2.0), to full orchestration (3.0). The complexity of the (online) merchant payments ecosystem has considerably grown over the last 25 years, driven by global e-commerce, security, compliance, and new payment products, channels, and touch points.
Payment orchestration is now in the middle of this ecosystem, right between merchants and a wide range of providers, in a way like the yellow Circle line on the London Tube map. Lots has been said and written about the need for payment orchestration, about buy vs. build, speeding up the implementation timelines for new products and services, and how it can help improve success rates and reduce costs 💰
In an ideal world, a payment provider (PSP) should be a one-stop shop, covering and harmonizing the end-to-end process visualized in the infographic. Over the last 25 years, it has become clear, however, that the fast-growing demand for payment products and value-added services, for merchants in a wide range of verticals, across multiple regions, is basically impossible to cover in a single full-service / collecting model. This is due to the efforts required to absorb all the complexities, but also due to the choices made by the PSP resulting from company strategy. A ‘tech only’ middleware can decouple the gateway and collecting component, adding flexibility, reducing dependency on roadmaps and strategies of individual payment partners 👨💻
First of all, it’s technology only, so outside of the money flow and contractual relationships with licensed payment processors and banks. An orchestrator should not have ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to applying business rules for transaction routing and invoking value-added services. That’s for the merchant to decide based on their own KPI’s.
So agnostic and independent are two key characteristics. Robustness as a company and platform redundancy are also mandatory, as a merchant, you’re handing over the orchestration of the entire transaction flow; therefore, both short-term and long-term availability needs to be guaranteed 🚀
Source: Paul van Alfen - https://shorturl.at/uJu4I
#Innovation #Fintech #Banking #Ecommerce #Retail #Merchants #OpenBanking #API #FinancialServices #Cards #Payments #Orchestration #Routing