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Insi g hts and Exper t ise
Insights and Expertise
Why early bets on tested their strategies over time and developed a level of

payment agility that others are only just beginning to ex-
payment orchestration plore. They’re rolling out new markets faster, avoiding the
impact of outages and adapting more easily to regulatory
shifts or scheme requirements.
are paying off Moving beyond merchant benefit

Much of the early conversation around payment orchestra-
tion focused on merchant gains, and understandably so.
Many faced a build-versus-buy decision. While some at-
tempted to create payment capabilities in-house, the effort
often proved costly and difficult to scale. But the model is
also proving valuable for other players in the ecosystem.

Acquirers and payment service providers (PSPs) are in-
creasingly looking at payment orchestration not as a
threat, but as a strategic tool. Some are embedding pay-
ment orchestration into their own infrastructure to help
modernize legacy platforms. Others are partnering with
By Tom Voaden orchestrators that offer white-label solutions that allow
BR-DGE them to offer broader payment capabilities to their mer-
chants, without a full rebuild.
t used to be that setting up payments was rela-
tively straightforward. Pick a provider, plug in We’re now seeing acquirers looking to use payment or-
your device and you were good to go. That model chestration to combine multiple back-end systems under
I no longer holds. As commerce has expanded across one interface, deliver a consistent experience across re-
markets and channels, the demands on payment systems gions, and retain merchants who would otherwise seek
have increased, and so has the pressure to make them more flexible options elsewhere. The goal isn’t to replace
more adaptable. existing services; it’s to enhance them.

That shift in expectations is one reason payment orches- Platforms are doing the same. For ecommerce provid-
tration has picked up pace. What began as a workaround ers, payment orchestration can help unify payment flows
for managing multiple providers has steadily built mo- across product lines or geographies. For travel tech plat-
mentum, first among digital-first merchants with global forms and software vendors, it allows them to offer enter-
reach, and now across the wider ecosystem. prise-grade payment features and open up new revenue
streams, without building those from scratch.
Adoption is accelerating for a reason. According to Global
Payments, 35 percent of businesses plan to increase invest- Modular adoption, real outcomes
ment in payment orchestration in 2025. The market is pro-
jected to grow by nearly 25 percent a year until 2030. What Another reason payment orchestration is gaining momen-
was once considered a tactical fix is fast becoming essen- tum is its flexibility. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.
tial infrastructure. And for the merchants who moved Businesses can start with one pain point, like tokenization
first, the benefits are now clear. or routing, and scale from there.
The early advantage We’ve worked with travel brands that began using pay-
ment orchestration for fallback only. After a few outages
The businesses that adopted payment orchestration early with their primary provider, they needed a way to build
weren’t just experimenting with new tech. They had spe- resilience into their stack. Payment orchestration enabled
cific, recurring challenges: slow onboarding of new pay- them to route transactions through an alternative path
ment methods, poor reach across markets, a lack of resil- automatically, reducing disruption without adding over-
ience, and fragmented integrations that couldn’t support head. From there, they expanded to include routing logic,
scale or adapt quickly to market changes. regional PSPs and new alternative payment methods. In
gambling and digital goods, we’re seeing payment orches-
For these digital-first merchants, payment orchestration tration used in more advanced ways. Merchants are com-
was a way to regain control. Rather than tying themselves bining centralized tokenization with localized payment
to one provider, they could access multiple acquirers, gate- connectivity and personalized checkouts to streamline
ways and payment methods through a single connection. both pay-in and payout flows.
More importantly, they could steer transactions based on
their own logic, unencumbered by their provider’s limi- Payment orchestration lets them manage these layers
tations. Those early adopters are now two steps ahead. without hardcoding dependencies or reengineering the
They’ve built payment orchestration into their operations, checkout each time they make a change.

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