Retailers Demanding More From Payment Service Providers in 2023

There’s a merchant mind shift underway in retail industry circles.

This, as changed consumers and an increased appetite for efficiency among businesses have combined to cause more merchants to demand more help from vendors, suppliers and anyone else who can offer some help, which in the case of payment service providers (PSPs) often leads to a chat about orchestration.

“The thought of, ‘How do I capture every incremental sale,’ has now become, ‘How do I make sure I don’t lose the sale?’” Spreedly CEO Justin Benson told Karen Webster.

These merchants are looking at their tech stacks and their partnerships with providers around the world to examine what’s working and what’s not — and where payments performance has been less than optimal, spurring consumers to abandon purchases.

“If you’re growing rapidly, you can’t afford to ignore any problems,” he said.

The drive to be more efficient is serving as a “trigger” for firms to optimize their payment methods mix, he added.

As a result, said Benson, “merchants are always pushing the payments ecosystem to do more.”

For the payments providers, he said — where building out their own global operations now has created a level of parity between PSPs — payments orchestration will become critical, moving far beyond what used to be a fringe use case before the pandemic.

The Drumbeat Gets Louder

And, noted Benson, “the drumbeat from merchants for this has gotten louder and louder.” The stars are aligning for payments orchestration to benefit all stakeholders across the payments landscape.

The lasting trend through the pandemic has been one where the demand for, and use of, alternative payment methods (APM) has soared around the globe.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) may have caught the public’s fancy, and cryptocurrency the lion’s share of headlines, through 2022, but there are any number of other payment methods, and local preferences, that must be considered on a market-by-market basis.

Along with the rise of digital commerce, he said, fraud prevention providers have had to reconfigure where and how they need to fit into the payments equation. In addition, providers are realizing that they will need to expand and support processing outside of their closed tech stacks. That opens up the path for FinTechs, including payment gateways and fraud services firms, to join those payment stacks.

At a high level, orchestration automates the payments experience from beginning to end, across providers, acquirers and banks — a one-stop shop of technical integration and data sharing that offers the best mix of services to support the merchant’s business strategy. The positive end result is that end users, the customers themselves, enjoy the best possible user experience.

Payments orchestration, maintained Benson, helps promote a flexible payments strategy that helps merchants pivot to that “bottom line” approach and not lose the sale — no matter the business vertical.

For Spreedly, looking into the year ahead as payments orchestration gains ground, “it’s a good time for us, as we’re more stable, have more data and have established relationships to help navigate through these uncertain times.”

Growth lies ahead as the firm broadens its support for APMs in markets including Latin America, Europe and North America. We’re likely to see online eCommerce platforms adopt orchestration strategies too, he said.

No one’s questioning the overall growth of online payments in the years ahead, macro volatility notwithstanding. And as Benson told Webster: “The world is better off when payments are connected.”