A payment orchestration layer centralises payment management by integrating multiple payment services, gateways, and payment methods into a single platform. If I’m a global merchant, this unified system allows me to streamline operations, automate processes like routing and reconciliation, and access consolidated data for analysis.
With one API handling all payment activities, I no longer need multiple, direct vendor integrations, which reduces complexity and boosts efficiency. It also gives me complete visibility into global payment flows from a unified dashboard, ensuring my payment strategy is both seamless and scalable.
Expanding into new markets becomes much simpler with payment orchestration. It connects merchants to an extensive network of payment service providers and payment methods, allowing them to offer region-specific options like local currencies, digital wallets, and alternative payment methods. This approach ensures they meet local customer preferences while complying with regional regulations. By automating tasks such as currency conversion, tax reporting, and data privacy adherence, international businesses can focus on scaling without getting bogged down in the complexities of global payment operations.
Intelligent routing greatly impacts merchants by optimising transaction success rates, reducing costs, and enhancing customer experiences. It minimises declines and builds resilience by dynamically selecting the best payment processor based on factors like location, transaction type, or payment method. Additionally, it keeps fees in check by sending payments to the most cost-effective providers and ensures transactions go through, even if one gateway has issues. For cross-border transactions, it supports currency-specific routing to match customer preferences.
In addition to routing across PSPs, tokenized card data can also be routed using various tokenization methods. By dynamically choosing which token format to use during a transaction, such as a network or a universal token, payment orchestration minimises delays and optimises transaction approval rates.
Looking at transaction data helps businesses spot trends like how often customers make purchases, what payment methods they prefer, and when they shop the most. This information is key when expanding into new markets or launching new products because it reveals spending habits and payment preferences, which guide decisions. Additionally, analysing payment processing efficiency – like success rates and failure patterns – helps optimise a merchant’s routing approach, minimising lost sales.
Finally, real-time monitoring helps prevent fraud by spotting unusual transaction patterns, so businesses can act fast to avoid bigger problems.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Open Banking, real-time payment systems, and Embedded Finance are already revolutionising payments and improving payment orchestration, apart from providing business benefits to merchants. AI can enhance intelligent routing and fraud detection, maximising approval rates and minimising merchant losses. Open Banking data can give merchants insight into customer behaviour, improving checkout experiences.
Tapping into real-time payment networks can improve cash flow and offer faster access to working capital. Plus, trends like Embedded Finance allow merchants to provide more ways to pay, which can boost sales while opening new revenue opportunities.
The pace of payments innovation is accelerating, which means more complexity for merchants and platforms. In part, this is due to its fragmented nature. Companies often specialise in a specific area – be it crypto conversion, AI-enabled risk and fraud, tokenization, embedded lending, or any of the other evolving sectors we read about daily. With the rapid growth of the digital economy, merchants will need to coordinate their payments and these adjacent services in all the places they do business.
Introducing new payment capabilities, especially when launching in a new market, often means adding more PSPs to the payment stack. Product and developer teams get stretched building and maintaining these, on top of the existing payment infrastructure. There’s an inflexion point – and we hear it every day – where managing it all directly becomes too burdensome. Merchants, faced with growing consumer expectations for seamless, secure payment experiences, recognise the value of a sophisticated orchestration provider and become part of the payment orchestration movement.
IXOPAY cuts through the complexity to optimise payment capabilities. This delivers winning outcomes both for our customers and just as importantly, their customers.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Global Ecommerce Report 2025, which provides a complete overview of key trends and strategies to help businesses worldwide succeed. Download your free copy today to explore in-depth insights on global ecommerce trends, the latest innovations in payment solutions, and strategies to stay ahead in a competitive market.
Brady Harris has over two decades of experience leading fintech and SaaS companies. Appointed CEO following the merger of IXOPAY with TokenEx, he is dedicated to advancing global payment solutions. During his tenure at Dwolla and Payscape, he oversaw significant increases in payment volumes and user engagement and fostered cultures that prioritise agility, high performance, and alignment with core values. His expertise in mergers, acquisitions, and scaling companies is key as IXOPAY positions itself to become the one-stop payment industry solution.
IXOPAY is an enterprise-grade payment orchestration platform that enables merchants to manage all their payment services in one place through a highly configurable, single API integration. Its product suite includes secure and smart transaction routing, comprehensive risk and fraud management, and fully automated reconciliation and settlement processing—all with detailed reporting and analytics.
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