Payment orchestration in the AI era

Maria Evangelou, Head of Marketing and Communications at Praxis Tech, examines how payment orchestration is evolving in the AI era.

The orchestration industry grew from a simple business need to make accepting payments from customers all over the world easier, faster, and less complex. Today, enterprises use Praxis to connect with payment institutions worldwide, enabling them to accept deposits and complete checkouts across a wide range of payment methods and in almost any currency. They also rely on our platform to protect their business from online fraud and to securely store customer payment details for faster repeat payments and subscriptions.

This delivers results, but the integration of AI-driven optimisation truly marks a new era for orchestration and is already supporting businesses to achieve higher acceptance rates, reduced fraud, and better overall payment operations. While the focus has always been to help merchants minimise complexity, AI-powered orchestration delivers these capabilities at a level of speed, precision, and adaptability that previously took entire payment teams to perfect. 

Orchestration is now far more than just connectivity, and platforms like Praxis connect merchants to systems that can inspect each card payment against hundreds of risk factors in milliseconds, route transactions to the best processor for each case, and learn from patterns drawn from hundreds of millions of transactions annually. For businesses, this translates into fewer declined payments, faster checkout experiences that support conversions, and stronger protection against evolving threats. 

The current state of AI innovation

The largest payment institutions are racing to integrate AI-driven capabilities across their platforms, and the results are remarkable. From real-time intelligent routing to adaptive risk scoring, AI has shifted from being an experimental add-on to becoming a core driver of performance for merchants.

Yet, companies are experimenting with different approaches for integrating AI. This year, we saw the first payments-focused foundation model launched, designed in a similar way to familiar large-language models but built specifically for financial transactions and trained on tens of billions of payment events. This model can detect card-testing fraud with exceptional accuracy, all while avoiding an increase in false declines for legitimate purchases.

Other major providers are taking different routes. One has introduced an AI-powered optimisation engine that works in the background, refining routing decisions, authentication flows, and retry strategies in real-time to improve payment performance. Another has focused on building a full-funnel AI suite that unifies fraud screening, conversion improvements, and cost management within a single adaptive system. These strategies differ in focus but share the same goal of using AI to make payments smarter, faster, and more secure for merchants worldwide.

What we’re seeing today represents only the beginning. While current models excel in their specific tasks, the next wave of AI innovation will deliver fully integrated optimisation engines capable of consolidating fraud detection, conversion optimisation, cost control, and customer experience enhancements into a single, adaptive system that learns and evolves across every dimension simultaneously.

AI as the new competitive standard

The industry is at an inflection point where embedding AI throughout orchestration stacks has become part of each platform's unique selling point to merchants. At Praxis, we’ve already introduced AI-powered capabilities and are developing more to deliver even greater payment optimisation. 

Our AI Smart Routing feature, launched earlier this year, continuously scans PSP performance data for each merchant and recommends routing changes designed to maximise first-time approval rates. Meanwhile, Praxis Safe, our flagship risk management solution, leverages Visa Cybersource’s AI-driven fraud detection models combined with our custom risk engines to help identify suspicious patterns before fraudulent card payments are sent for processing. 

Together, these show how orchestration is more than just a passive connection point between merchants and PSPs and instead is a proactive driver of business success. This is just the start, and the applications our Product and R&D teams are exploring today will fundamentally enhance how our clients interact with their payment infrastructure tomorrow. 

What's next for orchestration

The foundation of orchestration remains strong: rapid PSP integrations, global payment methods, multicurrency routing, secure tokenization, compliance, unified reporting dashboards, and comprehensive risk management. But alongside these core capabilities, platforms like Praxis are investing heavily in building AI solutions and are increasingly becoming the access point through which merchants benefit from the transformative capabilities of AI. 

For businesses, these advancements will only gain strength over time, as models continuously refine their knowledge base with every transaction, every attempted attack, and every routing decision. Over time, AI-powered orchestration platforms will learn exactly what works best for each merchant’s unique needs and recommend optimisation decisions accordingly. 

Just as orchestration began as a way to simplify connections to PSPs and payment methods, it is now also evolving into a single API access point for the latest AI-powered payment solutions. Connecting to platforms like Praxis enables access to AI models that work together to deliver smarter optimisation, stronger performance, and better payment experiences for both businesses and their customers.

About the author

Maria Evangelou is the Head of Marketing and Communications at Praxis Tech, driving the company’s vision and demonstrating its value to merchants worldwide. With nearly a decade of experience in fintech marketing, she combines deep knowledge of payment orchestration with insights gained from the merchant side, having previously managed projects at international trading and brokerage platforms. She also plays a key role in shaping Praxis’ strategic initiatives and supporting its vision to simplify global payments for merchants and their customers.

 

About Praxis Tech

Praxis Tech offers a payment orchestration platform that optimises payment infrastructure for globally operating merchants, providing instant access to 600+ pre-integrated PSPs, worldwide payment methods, and multicurrency support. Its services include PCI DSS tokenisation, fraud and risk management solutions, and checkout enhancements designed to increase approval and conversion ratios. Visit their website to learn more.