Payment Optimization vs. Payment Orchestration: Which Strategy Is Right for Your Business?

For merchants, failed transactions can really stall growth. Unpredictable fees, vendor lock-in, and scaling barriers also create big challenges. E-commerce businesses often face these challenges with a minimal payment setup that does not fully meet business needs. To solve them, many merchants look at payment optimization vs. payment orchestration. Both strategies are vital for enhancing conversion and approval rates.

Payment optimization improves payment stages using technology. It aims to boost approval rates, lower fees, and enhance the user experience. Payment orchestration takes a bigger picture of the overall system. It offers a single platform to manage various payment service providers (PSPs) and integrations. This provides more flexibility and control over the payment ecosystem.

Both of these strategies make online transactions smoother. But each addresses a different layer of the payment process and business priorities. In this article, we break down payment optimization vs. payment orchestration to demonstrate their approaches and help you unlock greater efficiency across your entire payment ecosystem.

Payment Optimization vs. Payment Orchestration: How Do They Compare?

Payment optimization and payment orchestration are closely connected but have distinct features and goals. The difference between payment optimization and payment orchestration lies in their approaches. The first is about performance, and the latter is control.

Payment optimization refers to any technology that enhances the payment flow. With payment optimization, you primarily focus on transaction-level improvements. This includes applying technologies to ensure a seamless checkout experience for customers. The goal here is to maximize the chances of a transaction’s success. Enabling robust gateways, smart retries, intelligent routing for selecting the best fee rates for specific locations, fraud checks based on criteria, and multi-currency support, authorization, and reducing latency are standard techniques to achieve effective payment optimization.

Payment orchestration operates at a macro level and empowers businesses to take maximum control of their payment infrastructure. A payment orchestration platform doesn’t process transactions itself. It brings all payment methods, PSPs, and acquirers under one roof. By routing transactions to the most suitable providers with the lowest processing fees, it reduces declines and cuts costs. Merchants can choose from a variety of payment options. They can include local and global cards, wallets, and more. This helps them cater to different locations.

To sum it up, with payment orchestration, you gain a unified platform that connects to multiple PSPs and features various technologies for payment optimization. This comprehensive setup lays the foundation for complete control and confident scaling.

How Do Payment Optimization and Orchestration Work Together?

In the payment optimization vs payment orchestration comparison, it’s not about rivalry but alliance. Orchestration builds the rails. Optimization helps the trains run faster and smoother.

Orchestration enables complete optimization. While optimization itself focuses on how individual transactions are processed, orchestration governs the entire payment ecosystem and creates a solid foundation for scaling.

Put simply, orchestration is the highway that integrates multiple PSPs. This software enables businesses to manage their payment network effectively, thanks to innovative technologies that deliver optimal results. The solution comes with a payment dashboard that allows merchants to easily configure, monitor, and optimize all their integrations through a single API and interface.

Optimization makes orchestration more effective. It ensures smooth performance across those multiple connections through improvements in payment logic, technology stack, and logic. This helps fine-tune payment processing for customers, impacting conversion by delivering a fast, reliable, and secure checkout.

To sum it up, orchestration gives businesses a clear vision of how different systems are connected, and optimization enhances the way they perform. Together, the benefits of payment optimization vs payment orchestration form the entire payment ecosystem and make it more efficient.

When Does Payment Optimization Deliver the Biggest Impact?

Payment optimization helps when a merchant’s payment processes are underperforming. The application of the right technologies can improve critical metrics:

Boosting approval rates for e-commerce

Optimization tackles declines at every step of the payment flow. Routing sends transactions to the top-performing PSPs. Seamless checkout lets customers pay as they prefer. Advanced fraud tools lower failures. This leads to fast authorization and settlement. Merchants gain higher revenue and a better customer experience.

Reducing fraud risk

Anti-fraud tech helps SaaS vendors spot suspicious activity quickly. This prevents losses and keeps checkouts secure. Tokenization and encryption boost security further. They replace sensitive card data with a unique identifier and scramble it during transmission.

Lowering cross-border fees for global merchants

Payment optimization helps businesses eliminate unnecessary costs through determining the best local acquiring.

Ultimately, a well-designed optimization strategy enables a more efficient, secure, and user-friendly payment flow.

Merchants often rely on a payment monitoring system to effectively track these metrics in real time. Discover how you can turn that data into higher approval rates, stronger security, and lower costs.

How Does Payment Orchestration Improve Internal Efficiency?

For merchants managing multiple integrations and PSPs, payment orchestration is key to global expansion. This strategy not only offers cost savings but also boosts internal efficiency in your payment infrastructure.

Development teams

Payment orchestration offers an all-in-one solution with both development and ongoing support. It allows merchants to switch providers freely without being tied to a single PSP. There’s no need to maintain an in-house development team, since building and managing individual integrations is costly and time-consuming, as the platform handles it all.

No more chaotic spreadsheets across PSPs

With payment orchestration, all data about payment providers is fully brought together into one dashboard. Operations teams no longer need to jungle between scattered data. Reconciliation, automated reporting, and actionable analytics are available in one place.

QA consistency across flows

Different APIs, error codes, or checkout experiences require QA teams to perform extra work by testing every flow individually. With orchestration, all the data on integrations is readily available in a single unified layer. This guarantees consistent flows and logic across providers, with less QA involvement.

To fully understand how payment orchestration differs from payment optimization, it helps to look at it through the lens of organizational alignment. In orchestration, a unified dashboard gives every team access to the same data. This facilitates collaboration and agility across different departments. The result is higher productivity and greater operational efficiency.

With our experience in payment orchestration, we have seen approval rates rise 15-35%. This success also opens stronger opportunities for scaling, as confirmed by our clients, Andrew Riabchuk, Founder and CTO of Akurateco.

Choosing the Right Strategy: Optimization, Orchestration, or Both?

You can take your business to another level by making a well-informed decision on how to improve your payment system. If you’re weighing payment optimization or payment orchestration, here are the insights on which approach or both you need to choose to meet your business goals.

When Is Optimization Enough?

Optimizing the transaction-level flow is your best choice if the scope of work is relatively simple. If you work with a single PSP, operate locally within one market, and have targeted metrics to improve, such as approval rates, cost efficiency, or transaction speed, then optimization alone can deliver strong results.

Making the payment flow seamless for customers can boost key metrics. It helps ensure every transaction is successful. When your business expands into new markets with different compliance rules, just optimizing may not be enough.

When Do You Need Orchestration?

Businesses that operate globally, support multiple payment methods, or seek to maximize approval rates require orchestration the most. Managing all this data is tough without a unified platform.

For large merchants, clarity and control are essential. Orchestration provides it through a single source of truth of vital payment data. By bringing together all the data in one solution, orchestration facilitates straightforward management and confident growth.

Think of orchestration as a layered approach that brings order to complexity, explains СЕО and Co-Founder of Akurateco, Volodymyr Kuiantsev.

All in all, if you have a complex payment process that involves multiple payment providers, methods, and services, payment orchestration can help achieve control, clarity, and scalability.

Akurateco Orchestration Case: 7-Step Process

With Akurateco, orchestration can have a transformational impact on your payment strategy. Let’s examine our client’s case and compare the before and after scenarios to see the effect:

• Without orchestration

Our client was struggling with scattered data about payment service providers, payments, and integrations. As the total amount of data to track continued to increase, it became nearly impossible for the merchant to manage manually or without a single point of coordination.

• With orchestration

The client centralized all integrations, gained full visibility into transactions, and significantly improved approval rates. Time-to-market for new payment methods was reduced, and operational costs dropped. This scalability and flexibility allowed for seamless expansion across new markets. Payments shifted from being a technical burden to becoming a core driver of strategic growth.

Cooperation with Akurateco starts with a comprehensive roadmap to suit your unique business goals.

1. Discovery

Our team learns about the client’s industry, risk profile, and specific priorities.

2. Case analysis

We analyze the client’s payment landscape, break down their case, and identify challenges: multiple providers, low approval rates, or fragmented data. Based on this, we prepare tailored proposals aligned with their goals.

3. Start of collaboration

Once everything is agreed, we start setting up the orchestration platform. This phase takes from a few days to a week, depending on the complexity.

4. Customization of integrations

At Akurateco, we have over 500+ integrated banks and payment providers. We connect both local and global payment providers, include intelligent routing and cascading technologies, real-time monitoring, and analytics.

5. Knowledge transfer and onboarding

We provide the client’s team with training on how to use the solution.

6. Go live

Once we ensure everything works as intended, we deploy the solution into live production and guarantee seamless performance.

7. Support and maintenance

We provide continuous support and system maintenance, ensuring long-term reliability and 100% delivery of agreed outcomes.

Conclusion

To ensure your payment transactions are as successful, efficient, and cost-effective as possible, consider evaluating two powerful strategies: payment optimization versus payment orchestration.

Orchestration serves as a framework that connects different systems on a single platform. This approach gives merchants complete control over their integrations. On the other hand, optimization enhances the effectiveness of this framework. It boosts approval rates, improves customer experience, and cuts costs.

FAQ

Is payment optimization part of payment orchestration?

When comparing payment optimization vs. payment orchestration, it’s essential to recognize that these two strategies are closely intertwined. Optimization is a core part of orchestration. It enhances the framework with strong technologies that boost key metrics. These include transaction approval rates, conversion rates, cost per transaction, and overall customer satisfaction.

Which is better for e-commerce: optimization or orchestration?

Both orchestration and optimization are essential in e-commerce. The first provides a unified platform to manage multiple providers and integrations. The latter fine-tunes that setup to boost approval rates and cut costs. For merchants scaling with many providers, the combination is the key to customer appeal and long-term growth.

Does orchestration reduce failed transactions?

Yes. Payment orchestration acts as a central control system for a merchant’s entire payment stack. Instead of relying on a single payment gateway, it connects to multiple providers and uses smart logic. Routing can be configured to send a transaction to the best-performing payment provider, while cascading reroutes a declined transaction from one payment provider to another and as many as needed within one payment attempt.

What’s the ROI of payment orchestration?

Payment orchestration is a win-win strategy for merchants. It helps achieve higher approval rates, lower transaction costs, and quicker time-to-market. Thus, the significant ROI is seen in increased revenue, reduced operational expenses, and the ability to scale seamlessly across new markets.