Payments Orchestration Eases Pinch of Int’l Expansion to New Markets

The unprecedented growth in eCommerce over the past two years has yielded opportunities for digital-first companies to expand internationally. But moving into new markets is just the first step of an international expansion strategy; providing a localized payments and commerce experience is the next.

PYMNTS research showed that international eCommerce merchants stand a better chance of converting cross-border shoppers when they offer a wider selection of payment options, according to the “Cross-Border Enterprise Payments Innovation Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Payoneer collaboration.

Get the report: Cross-Border Enterprise Payments Innovation Playbook

Digital platforms too are working to expand their cross-border payments capabilities in part because doing so can help boost the added value they can offer to merchants that use their platforms to reach customers abroad.

Coping With a Complex Web of Relationships

Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) must cater to their expanded customer bases by featuring multiple languages on their sites and taking payments across multiple currencies, Payoneer Chief Revenue Officer Robert Clarkson told PYMNTS in an interview.

“If you are a SMB, you need to be able to present to a U.S. buyer, a U.K. buyer, a buyer in [Vietnam], in their own language and currency to make sure you are relevant,” Clarkson said.

Read more: The Small Business Case to Act Global, Look Local

To further their expansion, many merchants, digital platforms, aggregators and other firms that conduct their business online have been adding new payment gateways and features to their payment stacks to help facilitate smoother entry into new markets.

The result is an ever-expanding and increasingly complex web of relationships between international eCommerce merchants, the platforms and marketplaces that connect them to customers abroad and the payment service providers (PSPs) that enable their payments operations.

The interdependency of these countless marketplaces is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are necessary to any well-rounded international payments strategy. On the other, it all can be just a bit too much for many firms to bear alone.

Enlisting Payments Orchestration Solutions

It is here that payments orchestration can help firms of any size realize their international ambitions. Payments orchestration can help international marketplaces and platforms reduce operating costs and maximize profits in several key ways, with enabling enhanced know your customer (KYC) and compliance capabilities being among the most important.

Payments orchestration solutions that leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) can also provide businesses with the flexibility that they need to add and remove new payments capabilities from their payments stacks without making fundamental changes to their core IT infrastructures.

Third-party providers also offer payments orchestration layers that can even be added to enterprises’ overarching enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and used to look under the hood of their payment operations as if it were a single, well-oiled machine.

The flexibility provided by payments orchestration not only ensures that platforms can easily add and remove capabilities from their payment stacks but also safely transact within and across countless international markets, each with radically different and constantly changing regulatory standards.

Payments orchestration thereby stands out as one of the more notable ways in which international platforms and marketplaces could reduce their cross-border costs, future-proof their payments operations and help them scale for long-term growth.