Payment orchestration is a hot topic in digital payments and needless to say, it has become even more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Essentially, a payment orchestration platform can help businesses scale faster, remove the complexities from their payments and optimize their payment flows. All of this sounds great, but naturally, most decision-makers want to know what problems does payment orchestration specifically solve, so I will discuss some of these issues below. 

Firstly, lack of agility is a real problem without a payment orchestration platform, as adding new payment options is usually very challenging to integrate. This leads to long time-to-market and decreased competitiveness, while payment orchestration solves this problem by providing multiple payment methods through one single API integration. 

Also, your business might lack actionable and insightful data if the transactional data is spread over multiple PSPs and gateways. This makes any kind of analysis difficult and it also makes fraud harder to detect. On the other hand, a payment orchestration platform aggregates and processes all this data, providing you with valuable, real-time analytics. 

There is also the issue of not having control of your transaction flow, because when you rely on a single PSP/acquirer the vendor has control over your flow. This increases the risk of payment outages, while the provider might also favor routing your transactions to a certain acquirer that is suboptimal for you. Thus, you might lose out on some business or have to accept unfavourable pricing, whereas with a payment orchestration platform you have control over your transaction flow and can set up real-time rules for switching transactions. Not only can this dynamic routing optimize success and processing rates, but it also allows for failed transactions to be re-routed to the next acquirer. 

High total cost of ownership is another issue, as the costs of maintenance, IT, integrations and development of new features are much higher without a payment orchestration platform. Contrarily, a payment orchestration platform leverages modern infrastructure to reduce the total cost of ownership. 

Besides, your customers might also experience friction in payments when they pay, attempt to re-use their stored card or want to use a new payment method. Payment orchestration solves this problem by providing a frictionless checkout experience using tokenization and various payment innovations. 

Reconciliation is another complexity that payment orchestration addresses. Evidently, without a payment orchestration platform you have to deal with reconciling multiple file formats arriving from different acquirers at different times, while refunds and chargebacks contribute to even more complexity. However, a payment orchestration platform provides a solution - automated reconciliation, which effortlessly reconciles all of your transactions, ensuring that files are error-free and that all of your money has been collected. You can read more about Refreshing payment orchestration for a digital future here.

Lastly, sub-optimal performance is another, rather broad problem that payment orchestration tackles from many different sides. Lower than average acceptance rate, high chargebacks and many fraudulent transactions are just some examples of issues payment orchestration addresses through intelligent transaction routing and fraud detection solutions.

Overall, payment orchestration solves the numerous pain points discussed above and in fact many more. Also, a payment orchestration platform enables you to take control of your payments and so it is a must for businesses who want to stay competitive and agile in the constantly evolving payments landscape.