How These Industries Are Turning Payments Failures Into Recovers

The Full Stack Makes the Difference

Full payment orchestration remains concentrated in finance and infrastructure.

To understand why some industries perform better at payments, it’s worth looking at what groundwork they’ve laid. A complete payment orchestration stack includes five core capabilities: automated routing, frequent updates to that routing logic, failover and redundancy (i.e., backup payment processors ready to take over instantly when a primary provider goes down or declines a transaction), control over payment tokens and the ability to add new payment methods without a major overhaul. The previous edition of this study found that companies with all five capabilities see a measurable return, while those with only some see little difference.

For complete orchestration deployment, finance and infrastructure companies lead by a wide margin. Sixty-three percent have all five capabilities. Commerce, professional services and media, and personal and property services trail behind. Bringing up the rear, just 4.8% of other services companies have a full stack.

Full payment orchestration pays off, but partial systems barely move the needle.

That order repeats across nearly every other measure in the study. Take, for instance, companies clearing a 97% payment approval rate (i.e., the processor accepts 97 of every 100 transactions attempted). Nearly eight in 10 finance and infrastructure companies hit that bar. Professional services and media companies also clear it more often than not. By contrast, only a minority of commerce, personal and property services, and other services companies reach 97%.

Over the past year, finance and infrastructure companies reported meaningful checkout completion gains more than five times as often as other services companies did, although the other services figure rests on just two of 21 companies and is best read as directional. In other words, the sector that already performs best also captures the most upside from further investment. Commerce companies and personal and property services companies land in between, each capturing a gain roughly one-third of the time, a sign that partial progress buys partial results at best. Across the full sample, most companies investing in orchestration still have little to show for it. Fewer than three in 10 report a meaningful gain.

The sector achieving the strongest payment performance is the one that has invested in full payment orchestration. Everyone else is trying to play a symphony with half the orchestra.

Visibility Isn’t Enough

Token control turns visible payment problems into fixable ones.

Nearly every sector can see when a payment fails. Real-time monitoring is widespread, although uneven, with professional services and media, finance and infrastructure firms, and commerce companies leading the way. In each case, approximately three-quarters of businesses track it. However, watching is not the same as fixing. When a payment is declined, commerce companies act on it with intelligent retry logic less than half as often as finance and infrastructure companies do, 41% versus 84%. Their eyes are open, but their hands are tied.

That gap comes down to who controls the payment tokens. These tokens are the encrypted stand-ins for a customer’s card number that let a merchant charge them again without holding the actual card details. When a processor owns those tokens instead of the merchant, moving that transaction to a different processor means either a lengthy migration project or asking the customer to re-enter their card information.

Companies with little control over their tokens automatically route payments just 7% of the time. Give them even partial control, and the rate jumps sevenfold, to 50%. Full token ownership is rare and doesn’t map neatly onto company size. Finance and infrastructure companies report full control most often, at just more than one-fifth of firms, while commerce companies, despite their strong monitoring numbers, report it in just 3% of cases.

Other services companies fare worse. Well over half report minimal or no control over their tokens, far more than any other sector.

Token control is what turns a visible payment problem into a fixable one. Without it, a company can watch its decline rate climb in real time with no lever left to pull. It’s the difference between owning your house keys and having to call the landlord every time you want to open the door.

Structural Barriers Slow Payment Modernization

Many firms know what they need to improve, but structural barriers hold them back.

The gap between sectors isn’t necessarily just the result of some industries prioritizing payment performance more than others. It also reflects the obstacles that different kinds of firms face. Building a better payment system requires the ability to actually add a new processor or payment rail without the process grinding on for months, and that ability is rare.

Nearly all surveyed companies (93%) need at least a month to onboard a new payment provider, and not one company in the survey managed it in less than two weeks. Adding a new payment rail is just as heavy a lift. Other services companies find that work especially punishing, with 91% saying it requires significant or full reintegration. Even in finance and infrastructure, the sector with the most resources to throw at the problem, nearly six in 10 companies say the same.

The barriers to improvement differ from sector to sector.

The obstacles aren’t identical across sectors. Compliance is the biggest headache for finance and infrastructure firms. Meanwhile, cost is the primary barrier for smaller personal and property services companies. If a company lacks the resources to invest in payment improvements, it can’t act, no matter how much it wants to.

These barriers can’t be fixed by just hiring a few more engineers. They’re baked into how payments infrastructure works, and no amount of internal effort shortens a compliance review or waives an integration fee.

That’s why how far a company has come may not directly reflect its intentions. Finance and infrastructure companies are currently enhancing their payment orchestration systems at 11 times the rate of companies in other services. Among commerce companies, 82% are investing or plan to invest within the year, but only about one-fifth are actually building today. Other services companies, meanwhile, are the most likely to report no plans at all or to say they’re undecided, even though, as the sector furthest behind, it can least afford to wait.

Many sectors know what they need to do; they just may not have the means to do it right now.

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Methodology

This report is based on a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 110 U.S.-based companies with annual revenue of $10 million or more, conducted from March 16-31, 2026. It is part of The Orchestration Advantage series and examines how payment performance and planned orchestration investment differ across industry sectors. Five sectors were built from the 15 verticals in the survey: finance and infrastructure (19), commerce (34), personal and property services (15), professional services and media (21) and other services (21). Sector-level figures rest on modest bases and are best read as directional. PYMNTS Intelligence independently designed, fielded, analyzed and wrote this research. Spreedly provided funding support but exercised no control over the methodology, data collection, findings or conclusions.