Payments Orchestration is changing the payments environment for eCommerce merchants and payment platforms/multi-merchant services.  Payments Orchestration is a technology solution that allows businesses to conveniently unify and manage the full cycle of their payments processing in one place.  Acting as a central hub connecting merchants with multiple payment service providers (PSPs), gateways, and acquirers, an orchestrator allows them to offer their customers the most relevant payment methods and comply with payment regulations in different geographies. 

In this article, our Chief Operating Officer, Liz Beggs discusses how payments orchestrator, Gr4vy, has provided benefit to three merchants from different parts of the world:    

• Rod Williams, GM Online and Digital, Baby Bunting, Australia;  
• Oliver Shaw-Latimer, Senior Director, Payments and Innovation, JustGiving, UK; and 
• A fintech company in Mexico. 

Each of these merchants have implemented, or about to implement Gr4vy, to better enhance their payments environment for their customers.  Whilst each of these merchants operate in different industry verticals, with different challenges, there were some common themes as to why the decided to go down the Orchestration path.  

Time to market  

With the payments landscape ever changing, it is challenging to keep up with the development work to ensure that customer expectations are met.  If merchants ‘build’ the infrastructure internally, they are met with high development costs, longer time to market and eventually diminishing returns.  This is why merchants like Baby Bunting and JustGiving decided to outsource this part of their business, allowing them to focus on the customer experience.    

Increase Revenue  

All merchants found that implementing a payments orchestration platform has increased their revenue.  They have achieved this several ways.  Firstly, they have been able to increase authorisation rates.  Authorisation rates measure the percentage of successfully approved transactions.  Every transaction processed online needs to be authorised by the customer’s bank.  

When a transaction is declined, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it cannot or should not be successful. For example, ‘soft declines’ from one acquirer may be a successful transaction with another acquirer, commonly known as a multi-acquirer strategy.  Therefore, with an orchestration layer, the merchant can route that transaction to another acquirer, that can result in success.  This can reduce customer care calls, as the transaction wasn’t declined and resulting in an uplift in revenue.  

Secondly, if merchants don’t offer a customer’s preferred payment method, they risk the customer abandoning their shopping cart at the last minute and not completing the purchase. Offering a variety of payment methods can stop this from happening, resulting in an increase in revenue.  With an orchestrator, merchants can easily add, change and remove payment methods with no development cost, using a simple click on the dashboard.  

“Payments Orchestration gives JustGiving a whole new world of flexibility into our platform that we have never had before. The ability to negotiate rates and fees with PSPs and having the ability to implement dynamic retries have provided this flexibility.

– Oliver Shaw-Latimer, Senior Director, Payments and Innovation, JustGiving 

Reduce Costs  

Orchestrators provide many connections to PSPs, gateways, acquirers and fraud companies.  This set up allows the merchant to go to each organisation and negotiate positive commercial arrangements and rates for processing payments.    

A payments orchestration platform can dynamically route transactions by setting up rules to route transactions to the most cost-effective payment processor.  This results in the merchant paying the lowest cost per transaction.  Also, these rules can be changed at any time with changing commercial arrangements.  

The merchant can also continue to reduce development time and cost by easily implementing new payment methods.  Previously, if a merchant’s PSP lacked the capability to accept a specific payment method desired by customers, the merchant had to either wait for the PSP to offer that payment method or switch to another PSP, which can be a time-consuming and costly exercise. Payments orchestration means that a merchant can easily set up an additional commercial arrangement with an alternate PSP connected to the orchestration platform that offers the necessary payment method or request an alternate PSP be connected if not already.  

For example, Baby Bunting wasn’t able to offer wallets with their previous PSP and now can easily offer them without any development work.  JustGiving wanted to offer cryptocurrency as a payment option and worked with Gr4vy to get them to connect to a gateway that offers this payment method.  Once again, with no internal development work.   

A fintech company in Mexico have been looking at entering a new country and this is made easier with orchestration by entering into a commercial arrangement with a PSP connected to Gr4vy that operates in that country.  This gets rid of internal development work for them.  

“Gr4vy has provided us with unprecedented control of online payments allowing us to have the agility and flexibility to respond to customer needs, tackle fraud and improve online conversion and profitability in real time.”  

– Rod Willams, GM Online and Digital, Baby Bunting 

Orchestration providers create and store tokenised cards, known as network tokens. Network tokens are unique digital identifiers used to supply symbolic placeholder data instead of the primary account number (PAN) in all parts of the payment chain. Therefore, tokens replace sensitive card data, like the account number and expiry date on the front of a card used for payment.  Holding these tokens and any cardholder data requires an organisation holding this information to be PCI compliant.  To achieve PCI compliance comes at a cost and therefore, if the merchant does not need to be PCI compliant, passing this requirement to an Orchestrator, will reduce their internal costs.  

If merchants are using several PSPs, having orchestration allows the merchants to view all transactions in one central location.  This assists with streamlining reconciliation processes and resulting in reducing internal costs.   

Gr4vy  

Baby Bunting and JustGiving made the decision to use orchestration in their businesses as they wanted to focus on the customer experience leaving the payments work to the experts, that do this for a living.  With speed to market, increased revenue and reduced costs, orchestration was a ‘no-brainer’.  What made Rod and Oliver choose Gr4vy for their payment orchestration needs? Several factors influenced their decision.  

• Gr4vy had the desired connections and offered a modern, best-of-breed technology stack with a no-code platform with single instances. 
• They provided value-added services, such as auto card account updater and tokenization. 
• The pricing was competitive and reasonable. 
• Gr4vy demonstrated a willingness to add the connections they needed. 
• The professional and friendly team made collaboration smooth.  
• Implementation was straightforward, supported by extensive SDKs.  
• The user interface was intuitive and user-friendly.  
• They were faster to market, taking only three weeks compared to the typical three months.  

“Gr4vy was our preferred Payments Orchestration platform because of its software and white label solution.”   

– Fintech company in Mexico 

Payments Orchestration offers merchants a streamlined, efficient, and adaptable solution for managing their payment processes. By leveraging the capabilities of an orchestrator like Gr4vy, merchants can enhance their payment systems, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth and profitability.  

Author: Liz Beggs, Chief Operating Officer, Melbourne, Payments Consulting Network 

Liz Beggs is a versatile and results focused leader with over 25 years of multi-industry experience in consulting and management. She delivers value add, innovative solutions to internal and external clients with subject matter expertise in commercial cards and payments technology systems, drawing on her broad commercial GM level experience in corporate services and product management. 

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Sponsored by Gr4vy, this article is part of our Payments Orchestration Education series.

Gr4vy is a member of both our Payments Orchestration and Token Vault panels. 

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