野花社区

Gain a fresh perspective on payments orchestration with Thad Peterson, Strategic Advisor at Datos-Insights; Anirudh Narla, Head of Payments at Hopper; and Debbie Brookling, Head of Merchant Customer Success at 野花社区.
Payments orchestration is a game-changing strategy that centralizes payment flows across multiple providers and systems, but not all solutions are built the same. As the global economy becomes increasingly digital, organizations face a significant shift in payment processing and management.

The merchant challenge: How do you optimize while reducing costs and maximizing your partnerships to drive new revenue in a competitive market with highly complex regulations?

Traditional end-to-end payment solutions are being replaced with more dynamic, loop-based payments orchestration systems. These systems aim to enhance the entire customer journey from the initial purchase to refunds, disputes, and the various operational hurdles that come with them.

The globalization of commerce and the integration of digital payments into the payments ecosystem have made it increasingly simple for consumers to buy almost anything from anyone, at any time, anywhere. How is this impacting merchants?

Thad: 鈥淎n omnichannel or universal commerce environment presents significant challenges for merchants. Each market has its payment methods controlled by separate regulatory bodies. We鈥檙e witnessing accelerated change with new digital currencies and instant account-to-account offerings emerging within many regions. When a merchant offers their goods across multiple markets and channels, they either work with numerous service providers or find an organization that can aggregate service providers. It’s a messy ecosystem, and it’s only going to get messier going forward.”

Debbie: 鈥淓veryone wants a seamless checkout experience across channels, but merchants must adhere to ever-changing regulations and compliance requirements. The breadth of payment options available and demanded by customers adds to this complexity. It鈥檚 really hard for our customers to keep on top of payments change while trying to balance their own modernization needs as well.”

Anirudh: 鈥�Companies are becoming more global, when your business is online, it’s much easier to expand into multiple regions. But from a payments and fraud perspective, it鈥檚 difficult to facilitate good global payments acceptance. Few single payment service providers can meet your global needs while delivering a best-in-class customer experience. So merchants must acquire locally, charge in local currency to achieve the best authorization rates, and support all necessary payment methods. This necessitates working with many top-tier providers and vendors in different countries, which introduces significant complexity.鈥�

It seems that payments have moved from enabling sales to being a strategic tool for competitive advantage, is this changing the demands on how payments are managed?

Debbie: 鈥淐ustomers will abandon their carts if their preferred payment method isn’t available. So many of our merchant customers want to extend their payments mix.  It鈥檚 crucial to align with customer preferences to avoid losing them to competitors, but offering options like ‘buy now, pay later’ can pose legal and compliance challenges. Providing a top-tier experience requires setting up a local entity, with its own tax and compliance complexities. It’s not just about integrating a new payment method, but also managing operational and legal aspects. Doing it to stay relevant and ahead of the competition.鈥�

This is where payments orchestration comes in.  It鈥檚 a concept that holds different meanings for various stakeholders in the payments industry. How do you define it and how do you feel players are measuring up?

Thad: 鈥淭rue payment orchestrators are agnostic. They can connect with multiple acquirers and processors, working with almost any payment service provider. They also bring value-added services like fraud control and loyalty programs. Many companies claim to offer this capability but wouldn鈥檛 necessarily qualify as payment orchestrators. It’s not a one-size-fits-all concept. It’s all about flexibility and building resilience in the payment processing ecosystem. Giants like Adyen, Stripe, and Fiserv wouldn’t be categorized as pure-play orchestrators, but 野花社区 would.鈥�

So, what are the key benefits that merchants are looking for in payments orchestration solutions and is there a need for platforms that can do more than act as a concierge service for payments?

Anirudh: 鈥淢erchants want payments to be frictionless and efficient, ultimately to drive maximum conversion. That鈥檚 why we鈥檙e striving for payment methods of choice, having clarity, showing the prices in the local currency, etc. It鈥檚 about maximizing authentication rates to ensure more payments go through.

鈥淧latforms can reduce false positives, so we can minimize declines and build efficiency to keep costs down. Fraud can be a major cost center, so we need more data to dispute chargebacks and win. Most importantly, we want to make better decisions about our payments strategy, across the whole lifecycle pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase.鈥�

As payments orchestration evolves how can it leverage data to improve experiences and tackle other challenges like fraud?

Debbie: 鈥淲e call this type of deep insight 鈥榩ayments intelligence.鈥� It鈥檚 the core of what we do at 野花社区. It鈥檚 about using the multiple data points that flow through a payments orchestration platform and applying AI-based 鈥榠ntelligence鈥� at the correct point to deliver an optimal and secure customer experience. We鈥檝e lots of use cases showing its effectiveness. This includes A/B testing to find the best checkouts, machine learning for consumer authentication, and fraud checks to enrich transactions allowing us to flag customers on a returns policy abuse list to combat this rising issue.”

Why should orchestration be a full circle rather than an end-to-end solution? Where do you see it going and how will AI play a part in its development?

Anirudh: 鈥淔or me, it鈥檚 about a future where payments orchestration fully manages the payments lifecycle; from pre-authorization to reconciliation to chargeback disputes. This would streamline operations, allowing merchants to focus more on optimization. There鈥檚 also huge potential for personalization in payments, catering to individual customer preferences, and integrating payments orchestration with omnichannel strategies.鈥�

Thad: 鈥淚 think there’s a real opportunity to use AI to make the whole ecosystem better. To help us understand what’s going on, what’s working, and what’s not. This is particularly important when you’ve got a failover situation and must roll quickly to another processor or if you want to switch to optimize acceptance. By using orchestrators to personalize each customer’s shopping cart and experience to have transparency at every transaction stage, to achieve full visibility.鈥�

Debbie: 鈥淚 agree, fully personalized checkouts are coming. It鈥檚 something 野花社区鈥檚 intelligent orchestration, multi-system data, and AI are driving towards. We’ve been using AI for years with our incremental machine learning for fraud, and we’ll continue to use ethical AI practices, backed with the appropriate human intervention. Another thing we’ll see a lot more of is back-end optimization, which means much more data harmonization.鈥�

Looking at the broader context what opportunity does this next level of payments orchestration mean to the future of the wider industry?

Thad: 鈥淚ntelligent orchestration can pull together all the data around transaction activity, and that鈥檚 a real gold mine for just about anybody who lives in the ecosystem. Merchants, processors, service, fraud prevention, acquirers, and alternative payment providers all need information to make their products better and more efficient.鈥�

Debbie: 鈥淲ith the right smart tools, payments open the door to a new level of understanding, especially when you add network tokens into the equation. At some point in the future, issued cards will have a network token so that you never have to enter your card details again, making one-click checkout the norm. Hyper-personalized checkouts 鈥� now that鈥檚 exciting.鈥�

Anirudh: 鈥淚n the long-term, payments orchestration is about removing the merchant鈥檚 鈥榚cosystem鈥� burden 鈥� not just routing transactions but also contracting, setting up a local entity, multiple processors, relationship management, operations entity, etc. In the future, we鈥檒l need providers that deliver the full-circle service.鈥� 

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This article is based on the 鈥淏ig shift from Linear to Circular – Navigating Merchant Payments鈥� webinar hosted by M茅lisande Mual, Publisher and Managing Director at The Paypers.