In today’s complex payments landscape, ensuring smooth, secure, and cost-effective payment operations is more important than ever. Businesses with high volumes of digital transactions or global expansion plans are often limited by fragmented and complex payment infrastructures. This is where payment orchestration becomes vital.
Payment orchestration is the process of managing and optimizing multiple payment service providers, gateways, and methods through a single, centralized platform. Without it, businesses face complex management issues, rising processing costs, high decline rates, integration headaches, and increasing fraud risks. Particularly for businesses operating in multiple markets or with multiple sales channels, payment orchestration can offer a path to simplifying payments.
In fact, among the most important payment orchestration benefits is the ability to reduce operational complexity while enhancing flexibility across all your payment channels.
So, how do you know if your business is ready? Here are seven signs that suggest it’s time to implement payment orchestration.
1. Your Payment Processing Costs Are Skyrocketing
If you’re locked into a single payment processor, you’re likely paying more than you should. Payment processors have varying fee structures, and without the ability to compare apples to apples, it can be challenging to know which processors are most cost-effective for your business. Switching providers can also take time and money as you migrate stored customer card data, for example.
A payment orchestration platform like IXOPAY uses smart transaction routing to automatically direct payments to the lowest-cost or most efficient provider, among several, in real-time. This helps significantly lower processing fees, especially as your transaction volume grows. By automatically adjusting to lower your costs, the savings can be significant, and there is no added cost or delay in switching between providers.
Want to understand the differences between payment processing and orchestration? Check out our guide on payment orchestration vs. payment processing.
2. You Struggle with High Decline Rates and Lost Revenue
A high volume of declined transactions translates to lost revenue, poor customer experience, and damaged brand reputation. Many declines occur because the processor's network is down or the issuing bank flags the transaction as suspicious. Transactions that fail for other reasons, including infrastructure or routing failures, are also costly if there is no fallback solution. More often than not, this leads to a completely lost transaction—an outcome that could easily be avoided.
With payment orchestration, businesses can increase authorization rates by retrying soft declines through secondary providers or routing based on issuer preferences. According to this guide, orchestration platforms can recover thousands in lost revenue by optimizing retry logic and intelligently managing payment routing to prevent declines.
One of the most impactful payment orchestration benefits is increased revenue recovery through smarter transaction routing and retry logic.
3. You Operate Internationally, or Plan to in the Near Future
Expanding into new countries brings payment challenges, such as handling multiple currencies, a range of different local regulations, and unfamiliar payment methods. These all add inconvenience, cost, and time to get up to speed with operations. Without payment orchestration, managing this complexity becomes expensive and complicated.
Payment orchestration, because it works behind the scenes with a wide range of payment providers, supports local payment methods, and handles currency conversion. In addition, a good payment orchestration solution connects businesses with a range of regional payment providers and can switch between them to ensure higher conversion rates.
4. You Need to Support Multiple Payment Methods
Today’s consumers expect flexibility—credit cards, debit cards, digital wallets, bank transfers, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), and more. Offering limited options can lead to cart abandonment. By providing the customer with their preferred method of payment, you improve the user experience overall.
With a payment orchestration platform, you can seamlessly integrate multiple payment methods from various providers into a single system. This improves customer experience and increases your chances of converting sales across channels and regions.
5. Fraud and Chargebacks Are Becoming a Major Concern
As digital payment volumes grow, so do fraud attempts and chargebacks. Without orchestration, managing fraud across multiple providers can be reactive rather than proactive. What’s more, a one-size-fits-all strategy cannot address global fraud management.
More merchants are turning to integrated fraud tools for specialized needs. Instead of one generic rules engine, integrate specialized partners. For example, Riskified for policy abuse, Forter, for instant behavioral profiling, and or Signifyd for guarantee-based coverage through a provider-agnostic platform like IXOPAY. This approach lets you compare and route transactions to the vendor most likely to say “yes” while still flagging the few truly risky attempts.
Payment orchestration allows you to integrate multiple fraud prevention tools across all your transactions, applying custom security rules to handle different fraud types. IXOPAY offers built-in fraud detection and the ability to integrate third-party solutions that flag suspicious activity and reduce exposure to fraudulent chargebacks.
6. Managing Multiple Payment Integrations Is a Headache
Maintaining multiple payment integrations means juggling different APIs, dashboards, reporting formats, and contracts. Asking your development team to work with multiple APIs creates delays and increased costs due to near-constant updates, operational inefficiencies, and the possibility of complex debugging cycles.
Payment orchestration streamlines this by consolidating all providers under a single API. This simplifies operations by replacing multiple integrations with a single, unified solution, reducing your development team's workload. The result is greater efficiency and significant time savings.
For large teams juggling dozens of systems, one of the clearest payment orchestration benefits is the consolidation of integrations, APIs, and reporting tools into a centralized environment.
Learn more about IXOPAY’s orchestration capabilities, including dashboards, centralized reporting, reconciliation, and vendor management.
7. Your Business Growth Is Limited by Payment Infrastructure
As your business scales, so should your payment capabilities. Legacy systems or overly rigid payment setups can lead to downtime, delays, missed opportunities, and customer frustration. Growing without ensuring your payment systems are scalable hinders your ability to expand efficiently.
Payment orchestration provides the flexibility to adapt more quickly, connect to new providers, and optimize payment routing without adding additional complexity. It also ensures higher availability and better uptime, reducing disruptions and improving the bottom line.
See how better uptime prevents revenue loss.
Is It Time to Implement Payment Orchestration?
If you struggle with two or more of the signs mentioned above, your business is likely ready for payment orchestration. Whether you’re dealing with high fees, failed transactions, international complexity, or fraud risks, a payment orchestration platform like IXOPAY can streamline your operations and boost revenue.
With IXOPAY, you gain access to:
A centralized platform for all payment providers
Smart transaction routing to reduce costs
Integration of local and global payment methods
Advanced fraud and risk management
Real-time reporting and analytics
Faster time-to-market in new regions
Are you ready to future-proof your payments infrastructure? Request a demo from IXOPAY to see how payment orchestration can drive your business forward.