Payment orchestration – can it truly enable merchant growth?

Dan Coates, Director of Merchant Product Management for ACI Omni-Commerce at ACI Worldwide, explores how payment orchestration enables merchant growth.

A recent ACI survey found that 85% of merchants plan to expand internationally. Ecommerce enables merchants to enter new markets quickly and access new customers and revenue. But international expansion is complex, as each market brings different currencies, preferences, regulations, and technical requirements. What works well in one country can create friction in another. Oftentimes, the most visible part of the buying journey, payments, is especially challenging. Adapting to local payment methods, managing multiple acquirers, ensuring compliance, combating fraud, and handling transactions at scale can overwhelm even the most experienced teams. For merchants, payment complexity in both domestic and international markets can hinder growth, increase costs, and compromise customer experience.

Why opting out isn’t always best

Some merchants opt to use a Merchant of Record (MoR) to alleviate the burden of compliance, tax, and settlement. While this approach may be suitable for smaller retailers seeking to expand into new markets quickly, it can limit flexibility, reduce control over margins, and complicate customer service and refunds.

For high-growth retailers, choosing to keep payments in-house, using an orchestration platform to manage and ease operational lift is a much better option. In fact, 62% of retailers are using orchestration platforms to simplify operations, improve performance, reduce costs, and broaden payment choice. By controlling their payment stack and orchestrating integrations across acquirers and payment methods, merchants can maintain full visibility and control over the customer experience and fine-tune performance accordingly.

Payment orchestration enables more choice, less risk

Whether it’s Cartes Bancaires in France, BLIK in Poland, Pix in Brazil, or Clearpay in the UK, modern consumers expect a choice of alternative and localised payment options. Using pre-built connectors, orchestration platforms help transform this technical obstacle into a competitive advantage.

This flexibility enables merchants to improve conversion, lower cart abandonment, and meet local expectations, which are crucial for global growth. New markets also bring increased fraud risk, with traditional systems struggling to counter synthetic and friendly fraud at scale. Consequently, 65% of retailers are already turning to AI-powered fraud tools to help them cope. When integrated directly into the orchestration platform, as with ACI, these tools can reduce fraud rates by over 40%.

The days of relying on a single acquirer are gone

97% of retailers now use multiple acquirers – one in four use more than five. The reasons are strategic: improved acceptance rates, reduced fees, and broader market access. Among merchants adopting this approach, 84% reported revenue increases by more than 2%. Additionally, 86% reduced processing costs, with one in five saving over 5%. However, half of retailers also report higher operational complexity. Managing separate acquirers, each with different integrations, dashboards, and SLAs, is a real burden. These efficiency challenges are where payment orchestration proves its value. In fact, 61% of retailers state that the benefit of easier multi-acquirer management is a prime driver for orchestration, while 50% indicated they need the agility to switch or add acquirers quickly. Retailers using orchestration are eight times more likely to see revenue growth and 5.6 times more likely to achieve cost reductions of over 5%. That’s a compelling case for making orchestration a core pillar of any international expansion strategy.

Choose wisely to future-proof your strategy

Rather than wrangling with multiple silos, an orchestration platform allows retailers to direct, monitor, reconcile, and report on payments from a single control point. Whether it’s intelligently routing transactions to the lowest-cost acquirer or automatically retrying a failed payment through a backup provider, true orchestration platforms like ACI are built to optimise performance across borders and providers.

However, not all orchestration platforms are the same. Some are additional layers that act like business intelligence platforms. And while some gateways may offer orchestration-style services, they often lack the level of functionality your business requires.

For merchants looking to scale their payment capabilities without compromise, to optimise without disruption, and to innovate without delay, they should choose a platform that:

• Eliminates vendor lock-in with processor-agnostic tokenization;
• Delivers seamless orchestration across mobile, online, in-app, and in-store;
• Optimises operations with least-cost routing and dynamic retries;
• Supports omnichannel needs like BOPIS, endless aisle, and omnichannel returns;
• Enables AI-driven predictive fraud prevention to reduce false declines, ID, synthetic, and friendly fraud;
• Provides access to best-in-class acquirers, methods, and partners;
• Operates on a scalable, enterprise-grade global infrastructure.

It’s time to rethink orchestration as a strategic tool

To succeed in today’s hyper-competitive digital markets, omnichannel retailers and ecommerce brands must drive speed, convenience, and resilience.

Orchestration solutions make this possible by unifying payment methods, acquirers, fraud prevention tools, real-time data, and analytics into a single intelligent platform, transforming payments from a source of friction into a strategic advantage.

Without orchestration, your commerce complexity grows, costs escalate, and conversion suffers. With it, you gain agility, insight, and control. That’s a solid foundation for any merchant looking to expand faster, serve better, and grow smarter.

This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Global Ecommerce Report 2026, 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.

About the author

Dan Coates is the Director of Merchant Product Management for ACI Omni-Commerce with over 25 years of payments experience. He focuses on solution use cases, insights, and thought leadership for merchant retail in the card-present, ecommerce, and m-commerce space. Dan has led payments implementations for major retailers, developed payments software for ACI’s Omni-Commerce platform, and implemented large-scale projects for many top global brands. His earlier roles at ACI include senior lead positions in engineering, architecture, consulting, and solution evangelist.

 

About ACI Worldwide

ACI Worldwide, an original innovator in global payments technology, delivers transformative software solutions that power intelligent payments orchestration in real time, so merchants, intermediaries, billers, and banks can drive growth while continuously modernising their payment infrastructures, simply and securely. With 50 years of trusted payments expertise, we combine our global footprint with a local presence, offering enhanced payment experiences to stay ahead of constantly changing payment challenges and opportunities.