54% of US Merchants Believe Payments Orchestration Reduces Cost

Merchants Say Payments Orchestration Reduces Cost

Implementing multiple payment gateways is a tall order for merchants and other companies as it requires dedicated information technology (IT) and payments staff at great expense.

Instead, many businesses are turning to third-party payments orchestration providers that remove the burden of payment gateway implementation, according to the “Payments Orchestration Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration.

Get the report: Payments Orchestration Playbook

Payments orchestration is a key tool for harnessing multiple gateways with minimum effort. It greatly simplifies payment processing by outsourcing the intensive and often tedious integration process to a third party. This allows all payment gateways to be consolidated in a single software stack, greatly limiting the potential for payment errors, as a payment can simply be routed through a different gateway.

Fifty-four percent of merchants in the United States and 62% of those in the United Kingdom said payments orchestration options reduce overall costs.

Making Multi-Provider Payments a Priority

Making multi-provider payments an investment priority is a mindset companies must adopt in a world where digital payments are becoming the de facto standard and require either serious time and resources internally, or expert partners to handle routing, compliance and more, Joseph Meuse, senior director of product management at Spreedly, told PYMNTS in a Tuesday (June 28) interview.

Read more: Multiple Payment Providers Give Retailers Super Powers to Flex on Demand

“You need to understand this in your design and your architecture from the beginning, Meuse said. “It can be complex to go back and have to refactor that type of solution in.”

New payment gateways are opening all the time, and each of them has different integration requirements that need constant maintenance, Meuse said.

Harnessing Multiple Payment Gateways

Payments orchestration systems harness multiple payment gateways on the back end while presenting a single stream to the merchant and customer, allowing merchants to seamlessly leverage an alternative payment gateway if the first one goes down.

This can result in higher payment card success rates by mitigating outages and leveraging higher success rates that one vendor may have in certain geographic areas or with specific transaction types.

It also provides merchants with flexibility to experiment with different payment methods for improving seamlessness and lowering processing costs.

Leveraging a Third Party

Businesses could potentially implement multiple payment gateways in-house, but this requires dedicated IT and payments staff at great expense.

Leveraging a third party not only offers a more seamless integration but also enables advanced payments orchestration systems such as smart routing, which automatically selects the optimum gateway for a given customer’s transaction type or location.

At a time when the popularity of eCommerce is skyrocketing and impacting the digital payment ecosystem, payments orchestration systems can help merchants implement multiple payment gateways without introducing frictions into the customer or developer experience.