Payment Orchestration: The next wave of payment innovation in emerging markets

The world of payments is becoming increasingly complex. With the rise of digital payments adoption, businesses face an ever-evolving landscape of new payment methods, gateways, and channels. Companies are forced to integrate with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) to meet varying consumer preferences – especially when operating in multiple markets. This results in high technical integration costs, operational complexity, and difficulty reconciling payments, aggregating reporting, and detecting fraud.

This is where payment orchestration comes in.

What is payment orchestration? 

Payment orchestrators enable merchants to manage multiple payment methods and providers through a single integration. These platforms act as a middleware layer – abstracting the complexity of managing and integrating with multiple PSPs and value-added services. This enables centralised payment data, which can be used for automatic reconciliation, performance improvement, and risk decision-making. 

Payment orchestrators are acquirer agnostic, enabling merchants to optimise their payments stack as volumes, consumer preferences, and payment methods change. This includes offering smart routing capabilities to improve transaction success rates and sales conversion, by exposing the most reliable and relevant payment options. They also reduce redundancy through automated failover in case of acquirer downtime.

The benefits of payment orchestration platforms

1. Increased acceptance rates: Payment orchestrators increase payment acceptance rates by providing access to a wider range of payment methods and routing transactions to providers that are likely to generate higher acceptance rates. Redundancy is also reduced through automated failover and volume splitting between different providers.
2. Speed to market: Reduce integration cost, time, and complexity by providing a single entry point for multiple payment methods and providers. This can help to quickly enter new markets and scale payment operations to handle higher transaction volumes.
3. Cost reduction: By consolidating payment processing and management, payment orchestrators can reduce costs through lower transaction fees, reduced operational costs, and improved efficiency.
4. Enhanced user experience: Improve user experience by providing access to a wider range of payment methods and seamless checkout workflows. This can help to increase payment acceptance and reduce cart abandonment rates.
5. Rich insights: Gain valuable insights into payment method performance and customer behaviour, enabling informed decisions about payment options. Track and reconcile all payments in one place, streamlining your accounting and support processes.
   
   

Who is payment orchestration for? 

1. Multinational companies and large enterprises: Increase speed to market and streamline complex financial flows across multiple channels and geographies. Ensure an optimal user experience and increase collection success rates through offering multiple locally optimised payment options. 
2. E-commerce merchants: Increase conversion rates and reduce card abandonment through offering multiple payment options, with seamless reconciliation and reporting of payment statuses in one place.
3. Marketplaces: Streamline supplier and commission payouts through split payments, and easily manage billing and reconciliation across multiple payment options. 
4. Banks and acquirers: Differentiate client experience through offering multiple payment and collection options, with streamlined routing and reconciliation to increase efficiency. 

In emerging markets, the payments ecosystem is particularly fragmented, with multiple payment methods operating independently. By consolidating payment processing and management, payment orchestration can help businesses to increase acceptance rates, improve operational efficiency, and enhance user experience – taking the pain out of getting paid.

Precium is Africa’s first payment platform purpose-built for enterprise scale. Industry leaders choose Precium to optimise payment performance, automate financial operations, and craft extraordinary customer experiences. Find out how Precium can help you achieve your boldest business ambitions by requesting a sales consultation.