Businesses are digitizing more rapidly these days, often tapping into new overseas markets and expansion opportunities created by COVID-19. They are also exhibiting increasingly robust cross-border payments capabilities, with a focus on simplicity and ease of operations internationally.
As we learn in PYMNTS’ inaugural June 2020 Payments Orchestration Playbook, done in collaboration with Spreedly, “The international eCommerce market presents myriad opportunities for growth, and the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified global demand for digital ways to shop and pay. The trouble is that many firms are not equipped to manage the complex logistics that go along with enabling localized buying and payment experiences for domestic and international customers.”
The new Playbook appraises how payment orchestration providers (POPs) can help simplify localized payments strategies and support international expansion efforts.
Analysis, Compliance, Speed
Payments orchestration simplifies and automates payments flows – enabling, for example, seamless recurring payments while monitoring card-on-file accounts to prevent customer churn due to fixable issues like expirations. Many merchants have built mixed tech stacks to do the job, which can be significantly reinforced with an orchestration layer.
The Payments Orchestration Playbook notes that, “A payments orchestration layer can serve as an intermediary between a merchant and its various PSPs, while also extending services that support payments analysis, regulatory compliance, cybersecurity [and] anti-fraud protection.”
“By adding a payments orchestration layer, a merchant or platform can route transactions to the service that best supports a particular region,” Daniel Wideman, vice president of product at Spreedly, told PYMNTS. “That can mean accessing the best fraud results for a given transaction, for example, and it can mean routing transactions through a particular gateway based on success rate data to improve acceptance. The result is more successful transactions across multiple markets and better customer experiences.”
Getting a Piece of $19 Trillion
eCommerce sales are expected to represent a $19 trillion market within seven years or less, with more than 50 percent of that volume coming from overseas merchants. Companies gearing up now for a significant rise in cross-border eCommerce see that growth potential as accessible.
“You want to successfully transact with global customers, but each region has differences that can dramatically affect the ability to accept payments,” Wideman told PYMNTS. “That includes the use of different payment methods by consumers. Even more fundamentally, your payment service provider may not offer support for a market you’re targeting, so your ability to operate in a given region can be blocked. At the same time, we see differences across regions that impact success rates.”
The addition of a payments orchestration layer within legacy systems can be a major in-house undertaking, but more and more companies are choosing proven third-party solutions.
“Adding a payment orchestration layer atop existing payments processes can help businesses more effectively authorize, optimize and process payments,” the Playbook states. “Businesses must therefore decide whether it suits their needs to build these solutions in-house or rely on third-party providers that specialize in such services. Those that work with third-party specialists must decide whether they want to build and manage the connections to their various payments services or focus instead on orchestrating them to optimize revenue.”
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