Simplifying Processes for Smoother Payments with Payment Orchestration 

Brady Harris, Chief Executive Officer at IXOPAY 

According to S&P Global’s 451 Research, 56% of payment and technology decision-makers prefer working with multiple payment processors, a figure rising to 64% for merchants with a majority of online sales.1 If you look under the hood of any of these payment infrastructures, you’ll invariably find a complex network of providers supporting numerous geographies, payment methods, and sales channels. Leading global merchants know that a multi-provider network is no longer in question. Instead, businesses should focus on effectively optimizing the complexities of a multi-processor architecture.  

Emerging as a primary method for solving these inefficiencies, payment orchestration offers global merchants a holistic approach to managing processes by connecting payment service providers through a single API. In the same study noted above, 66% of decision makers say payment orchestration is highly strategic to meeting their organization's long-term ecommerce needs. The value proposition is clear: orchestration delivers the benefits of multiple payment providers without the overhead and integration time, ensuring a secure, versatile payment stack.  

Let’s further explore how payment orchestration simplifies and optimizes processes for smoother payments.  

Improving Transaction Success Rates 
A backbone of payment orchestration platforms, smart routing uses pre-determined rules to dynamically route transactions to the best provider in order to improve transaction success rates. For example, a transaction that originates in South America is likely to be completed faster and more reliably if processed through a local provider with a locally preferred payment method. If a provider experiences downtime or delays, the transaction can be redirected to an alternative provider as a fail-safe.  

Payment orchestration platforms also boost transaction success by keeping card data current. Lost or expired cards can cause declines and jeopardize subscription-based businesses with unintended churn. With the most recent card data updated automatically, businesses experience higher transaction success rates.  

Minimize Compliance Burden 

If you’ve ever completed a PCI audit, you know this process is extensive, requiring a full team of experts to achieve and maintain compliance. By keeping sensitive data off merchant systems, businesses can significantly reduce their PCI scope—eliminating many of the burdens associated with PCI compliance. One way payment orchestration accomplishes this is through tokenization, a security method that replaces sensitive card information with unique tokens. Instead of storing and transmitting actual card numbers, merchants only handle non-sensitive token values, while the payment orchestrator holds sensitive card data and token associations in its secure vault.  

Reduce Manual Effort  

With numerous payment service providers reporting transaction details in different formats and file types, you can imagine the headache that technology and finance teams experience when trying to consolidate this data. Payment orchestration simplifies post-processing reporting for finance teams and provides a single source of truth.  

Instead of consuming company resources, automated reconciliation technology matches merchant ledgers against bank records, simplifying bookkeeping processes. And by automatically unifying reporting across payment service providers, file types, and formats, payment orchestration provides data that feeds centralized, customizable dashboards. Need to know which payment methods are most popular by region? Building customer profiles based on purchase activity across channels? Payment orchestration has the tools to make it happen.  

Working with multiple payment service providers is a necessity for global merchants. However, as more providers are integrated into the payment stack, managing payment processes and the accompanying compliance and regulatory burden becomes increasingly complex. Payment orchestration centralizes operations by connecting payment service providers through a single API. With this unification, merchants can holistically view payment infrastructure, optimize processes, improve transaction success, minimize compliance burdens, and reduce manual effort. 

Heading into 2025, the question isn’t “Should we work with multiple providers?” but “How will I work with multiple providers?” At IXOPAY, we think payment orchestration is the clear answer.