Build or buy is a question many businesses examine when it comes to major technology projects. In the case of payment orchestration, the option of building in-house has become increasingly untenable. In this article, we look at why the debate is rapidly shifting.
Merchants want control over their payment flows, costs, technology, and customer experience, but they also want the flexibility to adapt, in line with both business needs and market changes. This is where payment orchestration can deliver a range of demonstrable benefits.
Merchants and payment providers who are already clear about the benefits of payment orchestration can consider building orchestration solutions in-house to reap the benefits of the technology while keeping ownership.
However, that ‘process of exploration’ is now finished for most, and the reality has sunk in – that orchestration can only be effectively built, managed, and maintained by specialist independent technology providers.
For merchants who want to use orchestration to solve payments-related problems and tap into growth opportunities, the first big question is – where do you start? Assuming you’ve already qualified and quantified the value your business would get from implementing orchestration, there are two additional questions to answer:
Let’s say you’re looking at orchestration to solve problems around acceptance levels, resilience, and processing costs. Can you afford to start addressing these problems gradually or wait to see the initial results in, for example, two or three years?
You might be looking to use orchestration to power business growth, for instance, to quickly enter new markets, and deliver a localised payments experience. Are you willing to wait for that to come to fruition, or would you lose the benefits by taking the time to build?
There’s arguably always an advantage to owning your IP and being the architect of your processes. The question is whether you can move quickly enough to build it in the first place, and even if you can, at what cost? What other innovations might you have missed out on delivering that are already in your core business? Can you build again and again and keep realigning your tech stack to maintain all the various pieces of orchestration as your business and your customers evolve?
2. Dedication and resources: is payments a core competency for the business?
As an extension of the first question, it’s important to assess whether payments are something you’re prepared to invest in on every front. Are they something that you can build a team around, ensuring you have the right skills, knowledge, and experience as a lasting part of the business? Even something like implementing a new payment method can be painful to manage directly – and that’s without accounting for maintaining that connection and configuring it through your numerous custom payment flows.
On a day-to-day basis, a payments team needs to manage gateways and acquirers, fraud tools, routing capabilities, and data dashboards on multiple fronts (e.g., commercial agreements, integrations, updates, interoperability, chargebacks, new fraud trends, authorisation issues, system downtime etc.).
Ultimately, if the answer to any of these questions is met with hesitancy, then building orchestration in-house is not the right option.
The build vs buy debate is largely a conversation for corporations and enterprise merchants to consider. But what about other kinds of businesses – SMBs and even payment providers themselves?
Small to medium-sized merchants and other businesses can still benefit from orchestration, particularly from resilience and routing capabilities, ease of adding connectivity, and the aggregation of payment methods, which can all deliver significant value for any merchant. But the reality is that most SMBs wouldn’t even consider building orchestration for themselves – the required resources alone make it unfeasible.
While smaller merchants often rely on established acquirers and PSPs to deliver everything they need from a payments perspective, this can still leave those merchants with limitations in how payment processes are optimised and adapted.
The logical option here is for payment providers to have orchestration solutions in place – and this is certainly a great way to deliver the benefits of orchestration to a much broader range of merchants. However, the issues around building orchestration technology come back into focus here too. Despite acquirers and PSPs being payment businesses at their core, the time and commitment required to build is still enormous. Many also have the challenge of configuring orchestration services in and around legacy technology which they already struggle to maintain.
We’re already at the competitive tipping point for orchestrators themselves – it’s unlikely that a new wave of market entrants will come in, since the effort to build a fully interoperable orchestration platform from scratch would leave them too far behind the established orchestrators of today. For acquirers and PSPs to take advantage of the orchestration opportunity, working with a dedicated provider is the only realistic option – the investment required to catch up and keep up with established orchestration technology is an almost insurmountable challenge that could lose them the window of opportunity.
Thomas Gillan is the CEO of global payment orchestration provider, BR-DGE. He has navigated a diverse career, starting as a tech investor and advancing to leadership roles in B2B, SaaS, and payments technology companies. Recognising the transformative potential of payment orchestration to address longstanding infrastructure challenges, Thomas joined BR-DGE in 2021 to elevate the company to a market-leading position. He is dedicated to helping businesses find the right products and services, leveraging technology to simplify and integrate legacy systems.
BR-DGE is an independent payment orchestration technology provider. Serving as a technology anchor point, BR-DGE enables enterprise merchants, financial institutions, platforms, and payment providers to access best-in-class payment tools and products via a single integration. BR-DGE’s modular platform connects with over 400 payment methods and partner solutions, to help clients overcome payment challenges and drive better customer and commercial outcomes for their business.
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