Businesses are increasingly connecting to multiple payment providers to protect transactions from outages, but many have yet to develop the automated routing and control needed for full payment orchestration, according to new research from RS2.
The company’s new white paper, The Orchestration Imperative: Turning Payment Complexity into Strategic Advantage, found that 89% of surveyed organisations have payment failover or redundancy in place. However, only 41% use automated dynamic routing, while 22% continuously update their routing logic. Just 7% have full control over payment tokens.
The figures point to a gap between payment connectivity and active orchestration. Having several providers available does not necessarily mean a business can automatically decide which one should process a particular transaction based on performance, cost, risk or availability.
The research also found that 55% of organisations continue to make routing decisions manually, while 68% rely on manual intervention to switch providers during outages.
Radi El Haj, Group CEO at RS2, said: “Connecting to multiple payment providers is no longer the difficult part. The question is what you can do once those connections exist.
Can every transaction be routed according to performance, cost and risk? Can you automatically move traffic when a provider fails? Can you introduce a new payment method or acquirer without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure? And, crucially, can you make those decisions using real-time intelligence rather than manual intervention?
That is where orchestration moves from being an integration exercise to becoming a strategic capability.”
Why businesses stop at failover
One reason is that failover is considerably simpler to implement than dynamic routing. A basic setup can use a primary provider and a backup provider, with traffic moved when the first provider becomes unavailable. Dynamic routing requires much more data and decision-making. Businesses need to compare provider performance across factors such as approval rates, transaction type, geography, payment method, cost and latency.
Payment industry research also points to the operational burden involved. Managing several providers can fragment transaction data and require teams to maintain different integrations, reporting processes and routing rules. Dynamic routing only works effectively when those rules are monitored and regularly adjusted.
Legacy infrastructure is another barrier. Payment systems built around individual processor integrations can require significant engineering work when a new provider, market or payment method is introduced. Older architectures can also contain region-specific logic that makes further changes more complicated.
There is also a question of ownership and resources. Payment orchestration is not a one-time technology deployment. Provider APIs, fees, performance and availability change over time, meaning routing logic requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Businesses therefore need technical teams capable of managing the additional layer.
These factors help explain why an organisation may have multiple connections without using them intelligently. Adding a second processor can solve an immediate resilience problem, while building the infrastructure and operational processes for real-time optimisation is a much larger project.
What mature orchestration involves
RS2 identifies five capabilities that distinguish more mature orchestration: connect, control, optimise, protect and adapt.
These cover connecting providers through a common integration layer, centrally applying business rules, dynamically routing and retrying transactions, coordinating fraud and authentication controls, and adding providers or payment rails without repeatedly rebuilding core infrastructure.
According to the research, the difference can affect transaction performance. Among companies with all five orchestration capabilities, 78% reported transaction-completion improvements of at least 2%. This compares with 10% among organisations with three or four capabilities.
The business case can therefore extend beyond resilience. Dynamic routing can help direct transactions towards providers that perform better for particular transaction types, while automated retries can recover some failed payments. At the same time, centralised infrastructure can make it easier to add payment methods and providers.
However, orchestration itself introduces complexity. Industry research notes that businesses need to maintain multiple provider relationships and integrations, while the orchestration layer becomes another critical component that must remain reliable.
For merchants, PSPs, PayFacs, banks and acquirers, the requirements can differ, but the underlying issue is similar: multiple payment connections provide options, while orchestration determines how effectively those options are used.
El Haj added: “Payments are becoming more complex underneath precisely as consumers expect them to become simpler.
The organisations that succeed will not necessarily be those with the most connections. They will be those capable of making the entire payment ecosystem behave as one intelligent environment — continuously selecting the best route, responding to disruption and adapting as markets, costs and customer behaviour change.”
RS2’s white paper includes an Orchestration Readiness Test covering routing, failover, token control, payment-rail deployment, performance measurement and provider portability.
