Ask any large commerce business how many acquirers it works with, or how many integrations are holding together its payment stack across online, in-store and unattended in multiple locations, and you hear a double-digit number.
This kind of complexity accumulates naturally as commerce businesses enter new markets, open new sites, expand into new channels, and move quickly to meet new customer demands. Each expansion brings new acquirers and new integrations. Each new store layout, channel or buying experience brings new device types. And yet more new integrations.
Every individual call made sense at the time, but each one also added a little more weight to operations.
This was fine for a while but now many are finding that scales have tipped. Commerce has gone omnichannel and change has accelerated, while most payment stacks are stuck operating one decision at a time. And that’s left a growing number of commerce businesses counting the cost of payment estates that are a lot harder to manage, optimize and change than they should be.
The costs of complexity that you’re already paying…
Look closely enough and you’ll find the true cost of complexity in your payment stack in the hundreds of small inefficiencies that add up to serious commercial drag: monthly reconciliations between vendors and systems that take longer than they should. No way to see how payments are performing as a whole. Routine changes that get bogged down in development cycles.
But the costs become most obvious when something breaks. When approvals drop, the cause could be issues with the acquirer, connectivity or terminals, and getting to the bottom of things becomes an ordeal. Everyone owns a piece of the process, but no one can see the whole of the payment.
… and the costs you haven’t paid yet
The biggest cost, however, is what complexity stops you doing next.
On top of creating a tax on current operations, complexity can make future changes slower and harder. Entering a new market, launching a new site or adding a new payment method can become dependent on integration work and development cycles rather than simply what the business wants to do next.
Taking control back
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of having this complexity distributed across the payment stack, it can be brought together into one place where it can start to be simplified.
This is payment orchestration across online, in-store and unattended. By putting a single integration layer between your business and every bank, acquirer, payment method, device and channel, payment orchestration replaces a fragmented ecosystem with a more connected approach to managing payments across both card-present and card-not-present environments. Future changes can then happen through configuration rather than replatforming, and you get one live view of the entire estate.
Most orchestration platforms are built for online and stop at the software layer. TNS goes deeper — running the devices, connectivity, and infrastructure beneath the payment, not just the APIs — and orchestrating both in-person and online transactions through a single platform. The result is orchestration that performs not only online, but where payments are most complex: in-store, unattended, and at scale.
In the next article in this series, we explore what happens when you can optimize the entire payment process, not just digital payment flows.
Learn more at https://payments-marketing-team.foleon.com/po-campaign/payment-orchestration/