83% of Businesses Say APIs Are Critical to Their Strategies

Application programming interfaces (APIs) for payments orchestration can help businesses more easily add new capabilities to their tech stacks.

APIs play a central role in payments orchestration because they bridge merchants and a multitude of payment service provider (PSP) options. Eighty-three percent of businesses consider APIs critical to their strategies next year and beyond, as reported in “Accelerating the Time to First-Time Payments,” a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration.

For these businesses, the primary use cases of APIs include integrations to payment gateways, fraud management tools and other technologies. APIs are also a key driver of automated services, such as payments compliance detection, which are becoming more indispensable to business efficiency as eCommerce progresses.

Streamlining the Onboarding Process

With that progress in eCommerce, consumers in today’s digital-first economy are accustomed to the easy, convenient experience of shopping and paying for their purchases on popular platforms and online aggregators.

What many consumers don’t realize is the complexity of the payments process that drives those experiences. Digital platforms maintain relationships with many different merchants — each with its own payments stack — and historically these eCommerce platforms often have had to build new integrations with each new merchant customer’s stack as they onboard. This process, which often takes a month, can prevent merchants from getting their products and services to customers.

Payments orchestration can play a vital role in helping platforms streamline this onboarding process. It provides a single technology layer through which users can enable, optimize and analyze every aspect of their businesses’ payment operations, allowing them to flexibly enable the payment services their merchants need through one integration.

“Payments orchestration provides the flexibility to transact with any number of preferred gateways and payment services and allows organizations to easily add to, remove or test new options over time,” Spreedly said in an announcement earlier this year.

Read more: Spreedly Offers More Payment Methods With Stripe

Engaging the Help of External Experts

eCommerce platforms often find the best way to onboard new sellers is to leave technical problems in the hands of external experts. Payments orchestration providers use their own software to collate various back-end gateways and integrate with merchants’ payments stacks through a single API.

This frees eCommerce platforms’ staff to devote themselves to improving the customer experience rather than handling technical matters. Payments orchestration can accelerate merchants’ time to market, allowing virtual storefronts to run in a fraction of the time they otherwise might need and allowing eCommerce platforms to more quickly earn revenue from their merchant partners.

The benefits of payments orchestration also extend beyond the merchant onboarding process. Payments orchestration providers can offer advanced services such as smart routing. Smart routing takes a data-driven approach to match payments with the payment gateways that might yield the highest transaction success rate, reduce the risks of false positives and reduce a platform’s overall operating costs.

This use of payments orchestration is a far superior method of merchant onboarding than traditional tactics, which leave much to be desired.