Have you ever seen a conductor leading an orchestra? It’s quite a mesmerizing thing to watch as their rhythmic movements shape the sound of all the musicians into a beautiful musical composition.
Something similar became possible in payments not so long ago and even got its name from its musical inspiration. The spur of innovations in the global payment sector resulted in the emergence of a new type of solution, which has already won the hearts of various businesses.
Today, we’ll learn more about this type of solution and how your business can benefit from it. Here’s what’s important to know about payment orchestration platforms.
What is a payment orchestration platform?
A payment orchestration platform is a technological solution for businesses accepting or making payments online, designed for greater control and more efficient management of all payment and payout processes.
The term comes from the analogy with the musical world, where a leader unifies the orchestra, sets the tempo and shapes the phrasing and interpretation, helping to highlight the most dramatic parts of the piece.
In business, payment orchestration makes you a leader of your payment flows. Using such a platform, you’re getting equipped with sophisticated technology and features that allow you to find the best possible balance between payment processing costs and conversion rates. It empowers you to decide how each payment should be processed to help you reach your business goals. In the next part, we’ll learn how it’s achieved in reality.
How does it work?
Generally, payment orchestration platforms offer an out-of-the-box set of integrations with payment service providers from around the world. In turn, these ready-made integrations allow you to provide support for various payment methods and currencies, meeting the needs of your international customers. The set of connected vendors you’ll be able to work with vary from one platform to another, but this is what makes payment orchestration possible in the first place.
That’s because payment orchestration is built upon payment routing technology, allowing you to choose how a transaction will be processed once a customer initiates it at your checkout. By creating routing schemes manually or relying on smart payment routing capabilities of your platform, you can send each transaction to the best-suited payment provider or gateway according to your aim, whether it is the minimization of processing costs, approval rates increase, or risk hedging.
To summarise, a payment orchestration platform is a versatile payment management solution. It includes a set of integrations with payment providers, a payment page or pages, payment routing capabilities, support for multi-currency accounts, PCI DSS compliance, and other value-added technologies and features.
Why choose Akurateco’s payment orchestration platform?
We gathered the main reasons to opt for our payment orchestration solution in three blocks, highlighting the high-level pros most businesses look for.
Cost- and time-effectiveness
- A single integration with us is all it takes for you to get the power of connecting any of 100+ payment providers. We also establish new connections upon request, releasing you from the need to do it yourself. Generally, it takes less than a week. For you, it ends up being much faster and cheaper than developing integrations on your side. Besides, each integration requires timely updates and maintenance. We’ve got you covered in this regard, too.
- Working with multiple payment providers and relying on our innovative technologies, you can significantly increase your approval and conversion rates. We also provide you with a payment page crafted based on our years of experience in payments. It is designed with both consumers and merchants in mind.
Cutting-edge technologies and features
- We help you drive conversion and prevent declines with our intelligent routing technology. It routes each transaction to the vendor that would presumably to approve it and ensure successful finalization.
- Use cascading to distribute your declined transactions across various payment channels and give them another chance to be finalized.
- Benefit from simplified data management. We collect all the transaction details from all the providers into one place, unifying the format and making report generation and data analysis as simple as if you worked with a single vendor.
Security and protection
- Akurateco has successfully passed the PCI DSS Level 1 audit and assessment, getting a certificate of compliance that confirms we ensure the highest level of security.
- Our platform is equipped with sophisticated fraud protection instruments, helping you detect suspicious activity and minimize the losses caused by malefactors.
- With the help of our intellectual chargeback prevention software and qualified dispute handling assistance, 91% of disputes are resolved in our merchants’ favour.
How does it help to save on processing? A sample case
Here is one of the latest real-life examples of how our client managed to save on payment processing with the help of our technologies.
An e-commerce company entered four new markets at once without a proper payment setup in place. It resulted in a decrease in approval rates and a notable increase in payment processing fees. Together, these two factors almost brought the expected benefits of the expansion to nothing.
The merchant turned to us for assistance. We helped the company to connect the necessary local vendors at each market in a few clicks. Then, we set up robust routing rules for them in a way that a transaction made with a local card now goes to a local acquirer first and gets rerouted to another one only if something goes wrong. It almost instantly resulted in a 38% decrease in processing costs and an 11% increase in success rates.
It’s worth highlighting that this was not an edge case. At Akurateco, we’ve witnessed our merchants reduce processing costs by up to 50%. On average, our clients reach a 10% to 15% increase in approval rates.
What’s the recoupment period?
The time needed for your payment orchestration platform to make up for itself depends on many factors.
First of all, it’s the payment setup you’ve had in place before. If you’ve only worked with one or two payment service providers, in the short run, switching to a payment orchestration solution may be less cost-effective for you than for a company working cross-border with numerous payment partners. But in the long run, working with a payment orchestration platform will significantly lighten the burden of expansion for your company as it scales up.
Secondly, the type and size of your business, and thus the number and value of transactions, considerably affect the recoupment period.
From our experience, it takes an average of about 1.5-3 months for a payment orchestration platform to pay for itself.
For the offer and estimation tailored to your business, please do not hesitate to contact us.
