The complexities of Global Payment Processing
If you’re utilizing payments strategically, you know that every transaction is an opportunity — and every missed sale a liability.
The success of your payments, whether you face high decline rates or are bolstered by loyal repeat customers, depends on the effectiveness of your payment strategy. Without a plan that aligns with your business’s goals, the right tools, strategic partnerships and a way to connect it all, it’s too easy for payments to diminish your brand, whether through technical outages, poor checkout flows, or fraud concerns.
This problem is compounded for enterprises with a global footprint, who must navigate a complex web of regional preferences, local regulations and industry partnerships. Each market brings its own payment landscape — such as China's adoption of biometric-based payments, North America's preference for Klarna, and the EU’s PSD2 requirements.
As the digital economy confronts these commercial borders, a growing number of merchants are encountering obstacles on their path to global payment optimization. These obstacles include system outages, complex reconciliation, payment flows that aren’t compliant with regional regulations, and fraud systems that flag legitimate purchases.
There is a workaround to these global processing headaches—the multiprocessor approach. For some businesses, the question may be, “Should we work with multiple providers?” But for others, it becomes, “How will I work with multiple providers?” In this article, I’ll explore both questions and provide actionable insights to help you navigate the complexities of a multiprocessor strategy.
Why a Single-PSP model falls short
Partnering with a single payment solution provider (PSP) has traditionally been the path to integrated payment capabilities — yet while this approach is suitable for domestic operations or early-stage expansion, it is unsustainable for a company with a growing global footprint.
No one PSP can provide support for all international payment methods and ensure reliable uptime for billions of transactions — all while keeping costs competitive. According to the Merchant Risk Council, the average merchant now relies on 3.9 payment processors and 3 acquiring banks.
Merchants need to be able to tap into local bank partnerships and payment networks to secure low rates and cater to preferred payment methods. If they’re relying on a single platform with bundled services and pricing, scaling becomes costly and inefficient.
Two approaches: Buy vs. Build
There are two main paths for merchants seeking to implement multiprocessor payment systems. The first is to build a payment infrastructure in-house that consists of integrations with various processors and custom-built features. This option grants a high level of control over the payment tech stack, however, it’s a costly and cumbersome strategy.
Managing multiple integrations demands significant resources, including a sizable development team and substantial financial investment for both initial setup and ongoing maintenance. It’s important to underscore that these integrations involve more than just processing transactions—businesses must also address reporting, reconciliation, compliance and fraud prevention. As payment technologies and regulations continue to evolve, companies face the challenge of developing new features and updates internally, inevitably delaying their time to market.
Why payment orchestration is the smarter solution
While in-house builds can pay off tremendously in the long run, their upfront costs and development requirements are not feasible for many businesses. Once they are built, they need to be maintained, and often, a small update or new integration has downstream impacts across the entire system. Fortunately, there’s another strategy that fuses the benefits of a single-PSP approach with a multi-layered tech stack: payment orchestration.
Payment orchestration platforms, as we define them, operate as a central hub that connects businesses to a global network of payment providers while optimizing payment operations across the payment stack—all through a single API. So, instead of building out multiple integrations, merchants can plug into one access point for all their payment processing needs.
Again, this is not just about routing and processing transactions. Payment orchestration platforms should include post-processing capabilities to reconcile transactions, feed data directly to back-end applications and report on the whole stack of providers.
Payment orchestration brings a wider array of payment technologies and capabilities within reach so that merchants can enter new markets faster, more affordably and more strategically — without the need for extensive development considerations.
Seizing global opportunities with optimized payments
For those serious about maximizing every transaction opportunity on a global scale, payment orchestration stands out as the ultimate strategic solution. By connecting to a unified payment network, businesses can see their payment stack as a whole, ensuring it’s reliable, tailored and robust.
With a multi-processor approach, it’s crucial to optimize your payment infrastructure for regional payment preferences and performance — so you can transform every transaction into a revenue driver. Payment orchestration offers a smarter and simpler way to do exactly that.
