Today’s growth-oriented business leaders are navigating a landscape of uncertainty and volatility. Those keenly aware of funding challenges are likely to invest time and money into their core business rather than expand in-house technical teams to manage payments. After all, they are likely to want to focus on their business and leverage the expertise of payments experts.
This is where third-party payment orchestration services come in. By managing large parts of the payments ecosystem through a single integration, providers can often simplify integrations, and help empower businesses to focus on growth while delivering the kind of customer experiences that can increase revenue, normalise interfaces, and reporting across different geographies and payment types.
As the name suggests, orchestration is about coordinating multiple disparate elements to produce a desired effect. The main elements of payment orchestration include the integration, streamlining and management of the end-to-end processes across different payment methods, partners, channels, and markets. It could cover anything from authorising payments and routing transactions to handling reconciliation, settlements and reporting, anti-fraud, and security.
A good payment orchestrator should offer a gateway to all the microservices and payment service providers (PSPs) a client needs to drive growth. This helps businesses with the following use cases: quickly expand geographics, add APMs or an additional PSP processor, share card information in a PCI-compliant way with vendors in fraud or loyalty spaces.
By outsourcing this capability, those same organisations could invest in the resources required to find the engineering or product resources to integrate each individual service on their own. Instead, they can focus on entering new markets, meeting, and exceeding conversion and revenue goals.
Choosing a full-featured payment orchestration platform (POP) could help organisations:
Expand around the world: POPs can connect businesses with PSPs in multiple countries and markets at once. It also may help merchants to find financial and authorisation benefits of processing locally in these markets.
Accept payments the way customers want: Payment preferences can change over time. But a POP can offer access to services that offer regional payment methods. This helps businesses deliver personalised shopping experiences to streamline checkout. Offering regional payment methods may also help drive approvals, as local acquiring banks are often familiar with these country or market specific payment methods.
Optimise payment routing: With the expansion of payment complexity, many merchants may opt to build multi-PSP environments to provide business continuity, reduce risk, optimise authorisation rates, and potentially take advantage of cost savings. Improving this process could also have a beneficial impact on the customer experience by reducing the chance of a decline.
Provide business redundancy: Working with multiple PSPs also can help with business continuity, should a PSP fail. A transaction could be routed to another PSP to be retried without majorly impacting the front-end payment experience for a customer. Besides reducing risk in this way, having multiple PSPs can also help businesses optimise authorisation rates (as above) and improve cost savings.
Most organisations are likely to do some element of internal orchestration but are likely going to be resource constrained. They are likely to want to prioritise their engineers’ time on developing consumer-centric capabilities. Thus, a third-party orchestration platform can help to minimise cost and accelerate timelines. Organisations should have several criteria in mind when choosing who to partner with for payment orchestration.
They should start off by finding a provider with a track record of supporting businesses in the same sector. Next, they should consider functionality. Does the POP provide access to the range of PSPs and service providers required to deliver positive outcomes for cost savings, business redundancy, authorisation optimisation, transaction routing, anti-fraud/security, analytics, and so on?
Finally, companies should also seek to prioritise the most important capabilities in case there are trade-offs to make between various POPs and help you to meet your current and future needs. Geographical reach is also important, as is support for a suitable range of payment methods.
PayPal Braintree is a full-scale PSP that powers payments and orchestration for many of the leading global digital brands, including major rideshare, ticketing, food delivery companies, and others. 89% of the EU and 88% of the US PayPal Braintree users say that PayPal Braintree’s payment orchestration feature has met or exceeded their expectations1.
Reducing tech debt and costs associated with multiple integrations;
Unlocking international expansion and regional markets;
Integrating with multiple processors around the world to aid with international coverage and redundancy;
Helping customers to pay for products with their preferred payment method;
Reducing latency by enabling regional payment methods known by local acquiring banks;
Help with value added services from your payments solution provider.
B2B International, commissioned by PayPal, November-December 2021, B2B International surveyed amongst 504 mid-market and large enterprises in the US, the UK, and Germany, during November-December 2021. LE defined as merchants with annual revenue > USD 100 million; mid-market defined as merchants with annual revenue between USD 20 million - USD 100 million.
Cindy Turner has joined PayPal in September 2021 as VP Large Enterprise, where she is responsible for the Braintree & Hyperwallet product organisations, as well as a commercial Growth organisation that partners with leading ecommerce clients to light up new payments opportunities and optimise their environment. Cindy joins us after a long tenure at JPMorgan Chase Merchant Services (Paymentech), where she was most recently Managing Director, Head of Global Client Solutions & Core Product, and was responsible for all of the processing product and platforms of their USD 2 trillion merchant acquiring business.
PayPal has remained at the forefront of the digital payment revolution for more than 20 years. By leveraging technology to make financial services and commerce convenient, affordable, and secure, the PayPal platform is empowering more than 425 million accounts and merchants in over 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. For more information, visit paypal.com.
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