What is Payment Orchestration, and why scaling businesses shouldn’t ignore it

Scaling payment infrastructure used to mean building integrations one by one. Today, it’s about coordinating dozens of variables, from provider performance and fraud to checkout UX and cost per transaction.

That’s where payment orchestration comes in, and it’s growing fast, with the market expanding at 24% annually.

More fast-scaling online businesses are starting to look into orchestration, and if you’re one of them, it’s likely for the following reasons:

• You are actively expanding into new markets and want to integrate multiple payment service providers (PSPs) and alternative/local payment methods without the development and operational pains.
• Your financial team needs an easier way to reconcile and analyze all payment flows across a growing number of your acquirers, payment providers, and methods.
• You want to increase payment acceptance and cost-efficiency.
• You want to boost checkout conversions in your target markets. 

If you’re in the game of online commerce and want to understand if you need payment orchestration, here’s what you need to know.

What is payment orchestration?

A payment orchestration platform connects all the payment flows from multiple payment service providers (PSPs) and payment methods into a centralized platform. Instead of integrating each provider individually, you integrate only once, with the orchestrator, and then simply add new providers with a few clicks.

Orchestration also reconciles all the payment data from all your providers. It acts as the layer above PSPs and acquirers, managing how payments are routed, retried, and reported across the entire stack. 

Simply put, orchestration makes your payment stack more scalable, adaptable, and optimized for improved cost efficiency and payment performance. Orchestration platforms help merchants integrate and manage all aspects through a single system, eliminating friction, reducing declines, and enabling easy scaling.

How payment orchestration works

When a customer clicks “Buy Now” on your website or app, a lot happens behind the scenes. With payment orchestration, the process works like this:

Payment acceptance

The customer is presented with a checkout that offers all relevant payment options for their locale (for example, credit card, digital wallets, or local methods like BLIK in Poland or PIX in Brazil).

The orchestration platform ensures that the right payment methods are dynamically shown for the right markets, which helps drive conversions by catering to local preferences. It provides your customers with a unified, relevant frontend experience, regardless of the underlying processor.

Smart transaction routing 

Once the customer submits their payment details, the orchestration engine routes the transaction to the best available provider (processor or acquirer) using real-time logic.

This logic can consider factors like the customer’s location, card type, transaction amount, and historical provider performance. For example, a US transaction might be routed to Chase or Stripe, while EU transactions are routed to Checkout or Adyen.

The goal is to send the payment through the provider most likely to approve it (and even the one with the lowest fees in that scenario).

Automatic failovers

If the chosen provider declines or fails to process the transaction, the orchestration platform automatically re-routes the payment to an alternative provider. This feature is called Fallbacks, it works in milliseconds and is invisible to the customer, helping dramatically reduce the chance of false declines.

Instead of losing a sale due to one gateway’s outage or strict rules, the payment simply tries again via another path until it finds one that works.

Authorization and reconciliation

Once the payment is approved by one of the providers, the transaction proceeds to authorization and settlement as usual. All the transaction data, like settlements, fees, chargebacks, and refunds across providers, is fed back into a unified orchestrator’s dashboard.

Data is then reconciled in real-time and on an hourly basis to prevent any drift between the provider and orchestrator. 

Want to understand how orchestration could work in your stack? Reach out to our team.

Strategic advantages of payment orchestration

Payment orchestration platforms offer numerous benefits to businesses seeking streamlined and efficient payment processing. Here are the most important advantages and how they translate into value.

Speed up time to market by connecting to new PSPs and APMs in a few clicks

Each market has its core acquirers, payment processors, and preferred local payment methods. Without orchestration, adding each new payment method or PSP requires months of development work to build and maintain new integrations.

Direct connections with alternative and local payment methods also require having a legal entity in this country, which often is not what businesses want to spend their time setting up. In the end, the more providers you work with, the more time and money you invest in building and maintaining those connections. 

Orchestration platforms provide instant access to dozens of payment connectors in each market, saving months of development and reducing long-term cost.

Increase payment acceptance by optimizing payment routes

Orchestration helps maintain the highest possible payment approval rates across multiple markets and providers. It’s achieved thanks to:

• Access to multiple payment providers and methods
• Data on which payment providers perform best for each target market
• Ability to route payments to the most optimal provider
• Fallbacks that route the transaction through an alternative provider in case of a decline

For example, a merchant in Southeast Asia using the Solidgate orchestration platform saw a 30% increase in approval rates after leveraging our intelligent routing system to optimize payment flows across multiple local payment methods like Alipay, WeChat Pay, and credit cards. This kind of uplift isn’t a one-off: we’ve seen similar effects in various markets when businesses add an orchestration layer.

Centralized reporting and reconciliation

Reconciling all the fragmented payment data becomes a huge problem when you have multiple PSPs, APMs, acquirers, and currencies. Authorization rates, declines, chargebacks, fees, and settlement data are spread across multiple PSP dashboards, and finance, ops, and product teams all need different views to make decisions.

A payment orchestration platform brings this data into one place, providing a unified, real-time dashboard where teams can:

• Track key metrics like approval rates, decline reasons, chargebacks, and fee structures by provider, region, or method
  
• Run A/B tests on payment routing logic and monitor the impact
  
• Identify underperforming providers or high-performing local methods
  
• Analyze how changes like enabling 3DS, adding a new PSP, or adjusting retry logic affect outcomes
• Get complete cash flow visibility

At the same time, orchestration platforms simplify the back office. Everything is reconciled automatically across providers. For your finance and support teams, it’s much easier to track “Order X” through one platform than logging into five different merchant portals to piece together what commissions each provider charged you, and what your cash flow looks like. 

Scale without the growing pains

Traditional payment setups often don’t scale gracefully and can be quite rigid and fragile. Different payment gateways might have different UX flows, redirect requirements, or performance quirks. Or if you’ve ever had a spike in traffic, you might worry about one provider throttling under load. 

Orchestration lets you grow your payment capacity flexibly, without a linear growth in complexity or cost. You can handle large volumes by load-balancing across multiple processors if needed. If your transaction volumes double overnight, a good orchestration platform can seamlessly accommodate that by spreading payment transactions and avoiding any single point of failure or bottleneck.

Reduce fraud without compromising approval rates

Many orchestration providers integrate fraud detection engines, adaptive 3-D Secure authentication flows, chargeback prevention, and risk scoring. This allows you to protect your revenue and reputation while still approving as many legitimate transactions as possible. 

For you, this means less manual work catching fraud and fewer losses from chargebacks. The orchestration platform can, for example, automatically apply 3DS verification when needed (and route exemptions when allowed) or flag suspicious orders for review before they are completed.

By tokenizing card data and using secure vaults, the platform reduces your PCI DSS scope – sensitive data is stored by the platform, not scattered across your systems, which lowers the risk of a breach. 

Why choose Solidgate as your payment orchestration partner?

At Solidgate, we operate as a Unified Payment Infrastructure with three key layers: payment orchestration, global acquiring and acceptance, and value-added services, with orchestration being our primary focus. 

Here’s why hundreds of online businesses scale with us:

Connect multiple PSPs, acquirers, and methods with zero code

Solidgate allows you to skip individual connections and plug into a powerful payment ecosystem with more than 100 acquirers and local payment methods via a unified API. This means you can expand into new markets without building separate integrations for each PSP or APM, rolling out regional payment options faster without touching code.

Behind the scenes, Solidgate handles coordination, including routing logic, formatting, and compliance checks for each provider, ensuring a consistent and localized experience for your customers, regardless of the region or method they use.

Optimize payment routes for performance and cost-efficiency

Each transaction is automatically evaluated and sent through the most efficient route based on more than 20 parameters, including BIN number, issuer response patterns, location, historical approval rates, and more. If a transaction fails, Solidgate reroutes it to another provider in real time.

At the same time, your team can also set up custom end-to-end payment flows without any code, analyze performance, and iterate. 

Get granular reporting and centralized reconciliation

With Solidgate, you can consolidate payment data from all providers in a single interface. You can monitor approval rates, fees, and decline reasons across your stack and drill down by region, method, or provider.

This helps finance and operations teams easily get a complete view of your cash flow, spot performance gaps, and optimize costs. Reconciliation is also built in, so settlements, chargebacks, and payouts from different providers can be matched and tracked in one place, without jumping between dashboards. 

Analyze and optimize the performance of each provider

Building an effective payment strategy starts with visibility. But if your data is scattered across multiple PSP dashboards, getting a clear picture means exporting reports manually, aligning formats, and stitching everything together — and even then, it’s never real-time.

Solidgate’s analytics provide a centralized view of your entire payment stack, updated in real-time. You can break down your authorization rates and declines by provider, country, payment method, channel, or descriptor, across any time range that matters to your business.

This level of transparency helps you identify what’s performing well and where optimizations are needed without switching between tools or pulling data from different sources. 

Access built-in revenue acceleration tools

To help keep payments flowing, our platform includes several features that work in the background:

• Adaptive 3DS and 3RI support for balancing security, approval rates, and checkout experience

• Network tokenization (VTS/MDES) to improve issuer recognition and reduce declines

• Account updater and smart retry logic to recover payments after soft declines or card expiration

These tools are configurable and work automatically across regions.

Value-add tools that future-proof your payment stack

As your business grows, Solidgate offers a range of built-in features you can use without adding external vendors or integrations:

• Subscription billing engine that includes trials, renewals, billing calendars, smart retries, and more

• AI-powered dispute representment with evidence scoring and submission

• Early chargeback alerts and logic for proactive resolution

• A tax compliance layer that calculates and reports based on location and transaction type

• A fraud detection engine that enables secure transactions while detecting and preventing fraud threats across multiple acquiring channels

Each of these is available within the same platform and dashboard.