What is Payment Orchestration?
Payment orchestration simplifies and centralizes the management of payment processes. A Payment Orchestration Platform (POP) consolidates integrations with multiple payment methods and service providers (PSPs) into a single platform, acting as the control center for all your payment needs.
With payment orchestration, merchants can create custom rules to route transactions across different services, optimizing performance and reducing costs.
Key functionalities of a payment orchestration platform include:
- Acceptance: Offering customers the most relevant payment methods for a seamless checkout experience.
- Routing: Optimizing payment routes to enhance success rates and lower transaction costs.
- Reconciliation: Automating reconciliation across all providers for smooth payment processing.
- Analytics: Providing a unified, global view of payment performance to make informed business decisions.
Corepay offers a payment orchestration platform designed to streamline these processes, helping you scale and optimize your business with ease.
The Benefits of Payment Orchestration
Improved Business Scalability and Easier Integration
Expanding into new markets is often challenging due to regulatory compliance and the need to integrate region-specific payment providers, local payment methods, and currencies. Corepay’s Payment Orchestration simplifies this process by offering a flexible, vendor-agnostic architecture that unifies and simplifies third-party provider integrations.
With Corepay’s orchestration layer, businesses can launch new payment options quickly and scale faster by managing all payment service provider (PSP) data within a single platform.
Smart, Dynamic Routing
Corepay’s Payment Orchestration Platform (POP) enables businesses to optimize transactions through smart, dynamic routing based on custom rules. This ensures each transaction follows the best route depending on various factors, such as:
- Dynamically presenting customers with prefiltered payment options based on risk profiles.
- Choosing channels with lower transaction fees to reduce costs.
- Routing payments through high-speed providers to minimize latency.
- Automatically rerouting failed transactions to alternative acquirers to decrease failure rates.
This intelligent routing system increases payment acceptance rates, avoids downtimes, reduces checkout abandonment, and enhances both merchant and customer satisfaction.
Streamlined Customer Experience
A poor payment experience is a leading cause of cart abandonment. Corepay’s Payment Orchestration ensures a seamless, harmonized checkout process that keeps customers engaged by:
- Offering embedded checkout processes to keep customers on your site or app.
- Providing a broad choice of local and alternative payment methods.
By streamlining the checkout process and offering the right payment options, businesses can improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Better Merchant Experience
Corepay’s Payment Orchestration also benefits merchants by simplifying backend processes, including:
- Unified payment triggering.
- Payment splitting for mixed-cart purchases.
- Automated reconciliation and refunds.
Merchants no longer need to manage different reconciliation file formats from various PSPs. Corepay’s platform handles payments and refunds through a single API, making operations more efficient and less prone to errors.
Lower Costs
While traditional payment systems may appear cheaper initially, Corepay’s Payment Orchestration reduces long-term expenses by:
- Preventing third-party integration costs from escalating.
- Optimizing routing to the least-cost providers.
- Reducing chargebacks and payment failures.
This modern infrastructure ensures businesses save money while improving operations.
No Vendor Lock-In
Corepay’s Payment Orchestration Platform supports a wide range of PSPs and acquirers, ensuring businesses aren’t tied to a single provider. This flexibility provides:
- Freedom to switch providers as needed.
- A safety net against outages or unfavorable policy changes.
- Improved negotiation leverage with PSPs and acquirers.
Data Analytics and Reporting
Corepay’s Payment Orchestration consolidates all PSP data in one place, simplifying payment data evaluation. Businesses can generate real-time reports that can be shared with merchants, fraud detection services, or regulatory authorities.
Key insights include:
- Performance comparisons between PSPs.
- Success rates, latency, and peak-time performance.
- Customer behavior patterns.
These insights help businesses make data-driven decisions, optimize payment flows, and improve profitability.
Security and Risk Prevention
Corepay’s Payment Orchestration prioritizes security and fraud prevention through features like:
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Credit card data tokenization.
Additionally, real-time data analytics help identify security risks and integrate fraud detection tools to ensure secure transactions.
How an Orchestrated Payment Works
1. Checkout
At the start of the payment process, customers select a payment method from the available options. These options are prefiltered by the Payment Orchestration system based on criteria like location, risk score, and preferred currency. By presenting the most relevant options, businesses reduce confusion and improve the likelihood of successful transactions.
2. Routing
Once the payment method is selected, the Payment Orchestration system routes the transaction to the most suitable payment provider. Factors influencing this routing decision include transaction costs, response times, and the provider’s acceptance rates. The goal is to optimize payment success while minimizing costs and latency.
3. Processing
The selected PSP or acquirer processes the payment. During this stage, the transaction goes through verification and authorization steps to ensure the funds are available and the payment method is valid. A smooth processing phase is critical to reducing declines and increasing customer satisfaction.
4. Fallback Routing
If the initial payment attempt fails due to issues like provider outages, declines, or errors, the Payment Orchestration system automatically triggers fallback routing. This means the transaction is rerouted to an alternative provider to ensure the payment can still be completed without requiring customer intervention.
5. Confirmation
Once the payment is successfully processed, the Payment Orchestration system confirms the transaction. The customer receives a confirmation message, and the purchase is completed. This step is essential for building trust and ensuring a positive customer experience.
6. Reconciliation
After the payment is confirmed, the reconciliation process begins. Funds are transferred between the PSP, acquirer, and merchant account. The Payment Orchestration system automates this process, ensuring accurate tracking of transactions and simplifying financial reporting for the business.
The Advantages of a Payment Orchestrator Over a Payment Gateway
A payment orchestrator doesn’t process payments directly. Instead, it acts as a merchant-controlled decision engine, capturing and securely storing cardholder data while intelligently selecting the most suitable payment gateway or processor for each transaction. Unlike a payment gateway, which processes payments, a payment orchestrator focuses on optimizing success rates and reducing processing costs by leveraging strategic decision-making.
Payment orchestration is not a replacement for a payment gateway but rather a tool to enhance a merchant’s ability to optimize their payment system. By utilizing multiple gateways and processors, merchants can take advantage of competitive pricing structures, tailor their approach to high-risk transactions, or negotiate better rates based on transaction volume—all seamlessly managed through the orchestrator.
Risk Mitigation and Cost Optimization with Payment Orchestration
From a risk management perspective, a payment orchestrator enables merchants to respond to hard and soft declines in near real-time. It can reattempt failed transactions, redirect payments to alternative gateways, and manage compliance with chargeback thresholds. This level of flexibility ensures merchants maintain stable operations and avoid penalties or service disruptions.
Additionally, payment gateways often protect their profitability by focusing on low-risk, high-revenue clients while shedding higher-risk accounts. In contrast, a payment orchestrator empowers merchants to manage their relationships with multiple gateways and processors strategically, mitigating the risk of being dropped by any single provider. With this solution, merchants regain control over their payment infrastructure, turning what can often be a static system into a dynamic, cost-efficient, and resilient operation.
