This trade-off is no longer just a technical inconvenience. It shapes how quickly a business can enter new markets, how well it controls costs and how resilient it stays when a single provider falls short. A retailer stitching together five separate payment systems is a bit like a restaurant running a kitchen with five different stoves, no two working quite the same way, each with its own quirks and its own chance of failing at the worst possible moment.
This Tracker examines how open infrastructure is emerging as the foundation for future-ready payments. It looks at how businesses can combine orchestration, vaulting, tokenization and global money movement within a single, more flexible framework, one built to adapt as commerce keeps changing.
Merchants Need Control Without Complexity
Complexity is growing faster than merchants can manage it. Open infrastructure restores control through a unified foundation.
Multi-PSP strategies create new operational challenges.
Many enterprise merchants now operate across multiple PSP relationships, and not always by choice. According to a PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard study, half of middle market merchants report problems related to payment processes with their primary PSP. That gap is pushing many enterprises toward multi-PSP strategies to eliminate single points of failure and assist with redundancy and uptime, lower transaction fees through competitive routing, maximize payment acceptance rates, and support global expansion and localized cross-border payment methods. A multi-PSP approach helps scale businesses and avoid downtime and revenue loss. This shift raises the importance of orchestration, interoperability and centralized infrastructure management across a diverse array of payment providers.
As enterprises adopt these strategies, older infrastructure may place them between a rock and a hard place: Merchants can stay inside a closed ecosystem, or they can take on the burden of managing a fragmented network of providers. Neither option serves a business that wants to grow quickly and control its own costs.
Infrastructure complexity now extends beyond payment acceptance.
As commerce becomes more global and interconnected, merchants face challenges well beyond simply processing transactions. They must manage fraud and identity across channels, support cross-border payments and currency conversion, and connect pay-in and pay-out flows, all while keeping the customer experience consistent across every provider. Each of these tasks adds a new layer of operational complexity. Emerging models, including artificial intelligence-assisted and agent-initiated transactions, are also placing even more demands on systems that were never built for this level of scale.
PYMNTS Intelligence research found that among companies generating more than $1 billion annually, one-third reported rising digital transaction decline rates over the past year. Another 22% reported more false positives, with systems incorrectly flagging legitimate customers as suspicious. That pattern is a warning sign: Fragmented identity and fraud systems are struggling to keep pace with cross-channel and AI-driven complexity.
As these challenges multiply, merchants often find themselves cobbling together separate providers, tools and services, or else resigning themselves to vulnerable systems. The result is less visibility across the payments ecosystem and more operational burden. Addressing these issues requires a more unified approach to payments infrastructure.
The Building Blocks of Modern Payment Infrastructure
That foundation combines the capabilities merchants need to streamline today’s payments while remaining flexible for tomorrow’s opportunities.
Vaulting and tokenization create portability across providers.
Centralized vaulting, tokenization, evergreen credentials and multi-PSP interoperability are becoming foundational requirements for reducing complexity. By decoupling credential management from any single provider, merchants gain flexibility while keeping continuity across their payment ecosystem. It works something like a master key. Instead of the merchant needing a separate key for every processor lock, one vaulted credential can open all of them.
PYMNTS Intelligence reporting has found that merchants are increasingly investing in active vaulting systems that automatically refresh and re-tokenize stored payment credentials without merchant or customer action. Authorization performance is as strategic a priority as lowering processing fees, and active vaulting is one of the clearest signs of that shift.
Orchestration enables flexibility without fragmentation.
78%
of companies with all five core orchestration capabilities reported meaningful payment processing completion gains, versus only 7% of companies with just one or two capabilities.
Dynamic routing across processors can improve performance, cost and redundancy while helping merchants keep control across complex payment environments. Open orchestration layers give merchants centralized visibility and management across multiple PSPs and value-added services. None of this requires merchants to give up flexibility.
A PYMNTS Intelligence study of U.S. companies with $10 million or more in annual revenue found real differences based on orchestration maturity. Companies ranged from single-provider setups to dynamic multi-provider routing. The more comprehensive their orchestration capabilities, the stronger their results: better authorization performance, faster PSP onboarding and higher checkout completion. A fully built orchestration system was defined as including five core capabilities:
- Automated dynamic routing (i.e., directing each transaction to the most likely processor to approve it)
- Frequent updates to that routing logic
- Failover and redundancy (a backup path when the primary processor fails)
- Internal control over payment tokens (the secure credentials that identify a customer’s payment method)
- The ability to add new payment methods without a major technical overhaul
Among companies with all five capabilities, 78% reported payment processing completion gains of 2% or more, 11 times the 7% of companies with just one or two capabilities reporting those gains. Yet only a small fraction of companies have adopted that level of capability. Most are still building, a problem when the payoff depends on having the full system in place.
Global money movement connects pay-ins and payouts.
Open architecture and broad connectivity are becoming strategic differentiators for merchants operating at scale. Unified infrastructure can combine global payouts, foreign exchange optimization and integrated pay-in/pay-out flows. Together, these capabilities enable faster transactions, lower costs and stronger support for global commerce models.
This shows up most clearly across borders, where incoming and outgoing money often run on separate rails entirely. A merchant might collect payment from a customer through one system, then rely on a completely different one, with its own banking partners, currency conversion and compliance checks, to send funds out to a seller or partner overseas. It works a bit like a warehouse that receives shipments on one side of the building and ships them out on the other, with no conveyor belt connecting the two: Every parcel has to be picked up and carried across by hand. Marketplaces feel that gap directly: PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that marketplaces face seven-figure annual payout costs, driven not just by transaction fees but by the reconciliation, compliance and customer-service burden of moving funds across multiple external institutions. Unifying pay-in and pay-out infrastructure builds that connection, letting money move from collection to disbursement as one continuous process instead of two disconnected ones.
Independent monitoring by the Financial Stability Board found that only 35% of cross-border retail payments are credited within an hour of initiation. The G20, a forum of the world’s largest economies, set a target in 2021 for 75% of retail payments to be credited within an hour by 2027. With today’s numbers falling well short of that goal, there is real opportunity: Unified pay-in/pay-out infrastructure could close much of that distance and give merchants a powerful edge.
Future Commerce Will Depend on Programmable Infrastructure
Built on open, programmable infrastructure, businesses can adapt to new payment models, AI-driven commerce and whatever comes next.
New commerce models require more flexible infrastructure.
New commerce ecosystem models, including crypto, stablecoins, marketplaces, embedded financial experiences, multicurrency operations and omnichannel commerce, all require infrastructure that can support them within a single system. As these models evolve, infrastructure flexibility becomes more important to supporting growth and innovation, not less.
McKinsey’s 2025 Global Payments Report found that merchant payment providers are shifting from simply enabling acceptance to offering full payment infrastructure, including smart routing, real-time settlement, automated compliance and dynamic currency optimization. Digital wallets already account for roughly 30% of global point-of-sale volume, a sign of how quickly checkout itself is diversifying. This shift is pushing infrastructure requirements well beyond traditional payment acceptance. Merchants that are not prepared may find themselves outpaced by more flexible competitors.
Agentic commerce raises the stakes for identity, orchestration and reliability.
AI agents are beginning to initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers. As they do, the payments infrastructure layer becomes the foundation for an entirely new generation of commerce. Robust identity and data assets, combined with omnichannel reach and reliable application programming interfaces (APIs), give merchants what they need to support agentic experiences. Open, programmable payment infrastructure is not just a competitive advantage today. It is quickly becoming a prerequisite for commerce tomorrow.
Emerging research points to growing merchant interest in agentic commerce and AI-assisted transactions. It highlights the importance of identity, data assets, API reliability and programmable infrastructure in meeting that interest.
Leading platforms are bringing open, programmable infrastructure into production.
Leading payment platforms have already unified orchestration, vaulting, tokenization and global money movement on one platform, built to support not just today’s transactions but tomorrow’s commerce ecosystem models.
For example, PayPal reports its open infrastructure model can orchestrate 100-plus third-party PSP and value-added-service connections through a single platform. The company notes that bringing these capabilities together within a unified architecture helps merchants simplify operations, all while supporting future commerce models at scale.1
100+
Number of third-party PSP and value-added-service connections PayPal’s open infrastructure can orchestrate through a single platform1
The Case for Building Now
Open infrastructure is no longer a future concept. It is becoming the standard that separates merchants that can move fast from those that cannot. Across every industry, one pattern holds true: Fragmentation slows businesses down, drains resources and creates risk, while connected, programmable infrastructure gives merchants room to grow.
The businesses that win in this next era of commerce will treat payments infrastructure as a strategic asset, not a back-office function. They will invest in vaulting and tokenization to protect and simplify credentials. They will adopt orchestration to route transactions intelligently, rather than settle for a single point of failure. They will connect global money movement so payouts and pay-ins work together instead of running separate systems. And they will prepare now for agentic commerce, before AI-driven transactions become the norm rather than the exception.
The goal is less friction between them. A business juggling five disconnected payment systems will always move slower than one orchestrating those same five providers through a single, adaptable layer. Open infrastructure closes that gap, giving merchants the control and precision to navigate an increasingly complex commerce landscape without sacrificing the flexibility of a multi-PSP strategy. The businesses that build it now will not just keep up. They will set the pace.
Learn more about how PayPal unifies payment processing, acceptance, risk management and payouts for some of the world’s largest merchants.
1. PayPal Investor Day 2025.↩
