For Payments, Personalization Through Orchestration

The shift to digital commerce means that long after the pandemic is over, merchants across all verticals will have to offer a range of payment choices in order to boost conversion rates.

As PYMNTS research has detailed, as much as $158 billion in brick-and-mortar commerce will move online. And as the ways and means of paying online – spanning mobile wallets, person to person (P2P), card-not-present (debit and credit) transactions and a host of others – proliferate, the merchants that pivot to take into account (and respond to) customer preferences will be successful.

The issue is that integrating all of those different payment choices can be an arduous task. Payments orchestration – which leverages platforms to coordinate the complex range of gateways, fraud tools, rewards and partner merchants across a single view – can be one way to address the technical heavy lifting.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Andrew Penchuk, vice president of customer success at Spreedly, which offers a payments orchestration platform, and Jay Daugherty, senior vice president of product development at Fonteva, which offers an association software platform and an events management software built on Salesforce, said that payments orchestration has helped clients deliver personalized payment experiences.

From a high level, said Penchuk, “Digital payments are vital for anyone with an online presence, whether they are a merchant, a platform or a marketplace. And as businesses grow, there’s a recognition that they can launch more products in more markets and deliver better customer experiences if they leverage multiple payments services.”

Against that backdrop, he said, payments orchestration enables companies to use a combination of gateways, fraud tools and payment services that fit their needs. He pointed to the particular pain point that comes with juggling multiple gateways, and said that orchestration can manage, route and report on transactions as they are directed to the “right” services that will optimize an enterprise’s revenue.

Penchuk noted that “maximizing success rates and keeping costs low are the drivers behind orchestration.”

In reference to the joint efforts between Spreedly and Fonteva, Daugherty said that serving the associations industry, with its wide variety of sizes and types of associations, requires the flexibility to meet a broad range of needs.

“As we were going to various customers, it became quite clear that they utilize a variety of payment providers,” he noted. “We would either have to create a lot of different integrations to these providers or find a better solution.”

It became increasingly clear that completing one integration via Spreedly’s API with a host of payments providers offered the connectivity that Fonteva’s clients desired, across mobile wallets and many gateways. Spreedly’s Penchuk said his firm offers 120 different gateways through that aforementioned single point of connection.

Security remains top of mind, the two executives told PYMNTS, and Penchuk noted that Spreedly’s platform securely captures credit cards and stores them safely in a vault while limiting the organization’s PCI-DSS scope.

With a nod to the value of outsourcing at least some of the backend processes tied to payments, Fonteva’s Daugherty said that as a growing tech  firm, “we don’t have unlimited resources, so leveraging the Salesforce ecosystem and working with best-of-breed providers magnifies our ability to add value to our customers.” The partnership with Spreedly allows the company to easily and flexibly integrate with a broad range of payment providers.

As Daugherty told PYMNTS: “The partnership has freed us up to focus our energies on our core functionality through specific value-adds that meet the unique needs of our customers.”