Payment Orchestration Is Eating the Stack

A middleware layer that barely existed five years ago is now projected to be a $6 billion market by 2030. Payment orchestration platforms are inserting themselves between merchants and PSPs, absorbing functionality that used to belong to gateways, acquirers, and processors. This piece maps what's happening, who the players are, and what the structural consequences look like for payment operators and product teams.

What Payment Orchestration Actually Is

Payment orchestration is a software layer that sits between a merchant's checkout and multiple downstream payment service providers. It manages routing logic, failover, tokenization, and analytics across PSPs through a single integration point.

The technical distinction matters: a payment gateway is a fixed pipe connecting a checkout page to a single acquirer or PSP. It encrypts card data and passes authorize/decline decisions. A payment orchestration platform does something different — it decides which PSP should process a given transaction based on real-time variables: geography, card network, transaction amount, historical approval rates, and cost.

In practical terms, the orchestration layer absorbs three functions that merchants previously managed themselves or didn't have at all:

• Smart routing — selecting the optimal processor per transaction based on configurable rules or ML models
• Failover and cascading — automatically re-routing declined transactions to alternative processors in real time
• Processor-agnostic token vaulting — storing payment credentials in a vault that isn't owned by any single PSP, eliminating the data lock-in that makes switching providers painful

This is not a marginal optimization. Merchants integrating orchestration platforms report 2–4% increases in authorization rates immediately after implementation, according to processors publishing benchmarks. Cascading retry logic alone can recapture 10% or more of revenue that would otherwise be lost to soft declines. AI-based routing modules deployed in 2024 cut authorization declines by up to 12% in high-volume verticals like travel and digital subscriptions.

Why the Layer Exists Now

Payment orchestration emerged because of a structural shift in how merchants manage payments. Three forces created the opening:

1. Payment method fragmentation

Merchants now integrate an average of 6–8 payment methods, according to industry data from Grand View Research. Five years ago, card networks plus PayPal covered most checkout flows. Today, a merchant selling cross-border needs to support local card schemes, bank transfers, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, GrabPay, Alipay), buy-now-pay-later providers, and potentially real-time payment rails like PIX, UPI, or FedNow. Each method requires a different integration, different settlement logic, and different reconciliation flows.

No single PSP covers all of these well in every geography. The result: merchants end up with multiple PSP integrations, each with its own API, dashboard, and tokenization scheme. Managing this without a unifying layer is an engineering and ops burden that scales badly.

2. Authorization rate economics

For high-volume merchants, every basis point of authorization rate improvement translates directly to revenue. A merchant processing $500M annually with a 92% authorization rate leaves $40M on the table. Moving that to 94% through intelligent routing and cascading retries recovers $10M — far more than the cost of an orchestration platform.

This math is why the orchestration layer found product-market fit with mid-to-large merchants first. The unit economics only work when transaction volume is high enough that routing optimization produces meaningful dollar improvements.

3. PSP lock-in and switching costs

The traditional payments stack creates deep vendor lock-in. When a merchant vaults card tokens with Stripe, those tokens are Stripe-proprietary. Switching to Adyen means re-collecting payment credentials from every stored customer — a migration that can take months and introduces churn risk. The orchestration layer breaks this by owning the token vault itself, making PSPs interchangeable downstream.

This is the part that PSPs pay the most attention to, because it directly threatens their retention economics.

Who's Building What

The orchestration landscape has split into two camps: independent platforms and PSP-native features. The competitive dynamics between them are the most structurally interesting part of this market.

Independent orchestration platforms

These are vendor-neutral middleware layers. The merchant integrates once, and the platform handles connections to multiple PSPs:

• Spreedly — the longest-standing player, founded in 2008. Operates primarily as a payments orchestration and tokenization platform. Recently launched Recover, a product that detects gateway outages and soft declines and automatically retries transactions across alternative processors.
• Primer — London-based, founded in 2020 by former Braintree engineers. Raised $73.9M total at a $425M valuation (2021). Projected ~£6M in 2024 revenue with 200% year-over-year growth targets. Expanding across EU, US, and APAC in 2025, with J.P. Morgan Payments joining the platform in March 2025.
• Gr4vy — cloud-native orchestration with an infrastructure-as-code approach. Raised $15M Series A extension in 2022. Positions itself as the orchestration layer merchants can deploy and configure like infrastructure, not SaaS.
• Corefy, CellPoint Digital, APEXX Global, Yuno — additional players targeting different merchant segments and geographies. CellPoint focuses on airlines and travel. Yuno targets Latin American expansion.

There are now roughly 30 platforms offering orchestration layers, and competition is intensifying. The market is still fragmented — no single independent platform dominates — but the direction is clear: this layer is consolidating into a standard part of the enterprise payments stack.

PSP-native orchestration

The PSPs themselves have noticed the threat and are responding.

Stripe's Vault and Forward API, launched in 2024, is the most significant move. It lets merchants use Stripe's tokenization infrastructure and checkout UI while routing transactions to third-party processors. This is a meaningful strategic shift: Stripe is opening what was previously a walled-garden platform, allowing merchants to treat Stripe as one processor among several rather than the single owner of the payment flow. The implicit message: better to be the preferred vault and checkout layer in a multi-PSP stack than to lose the merchant entirely to an independent orchestrator.

Adyen has taken a different approach, adding orchestration-like optimization features within its own network. Adyen claims merchants can save up to 5% on total payment costs through its internal routing optimization. The bet is that Adyen's global acquiring network is broad enough that merchants don't need multi-PSP routing — Adyen can route optimally within its own infrastructure.

This PSP-vs-independent tension is the central dynamic shaping the market. Independent platforms argue that vendor-neutral routing is the only way to get truly optimal outcomes. PSPs argue that adding orchestration complexity introduces latency, additional failure points, and another vendor relationship to manage. Both arguments have merit, and the right answer depends on the merchant's volume, geography mix, and tolerance for integration complexity.

The Token Vault Is the Real Battleground

Routing logic and failover get the most attention in orchestration marketing, but the strategically important piece is the token vault.

Whoever owns the token vault owns the merchant relationship's switching costs. When a merchant's stored payment credentials sit in a PSP-proprietary vault, that PSP has structural retention leverage. When the credentials sit in a processor-agnostic vault — whether owned by an independent orchestrator or by the merchant directly — PSPs become interchangeable commodity processors competing on price and approval rates.

This is why Stripe built Vault and Forward rather than ignoring orchestration entirely. Stripe's bet is that merchants will keep tokenizing through Stripe even if they route some transactions elsewhere — preserving Stripe's position as the system of record for payment credentials.

Network tokenization adds another dimension. Network tokens are provisioned by card networks (Visa, Mastercard) and are processor-agnostic by design — they work across any PSP without compatibility issues. Merchants combining network tokens with orchestration are seeing up to 4.6% higher authorization rates on card-not-present transactions and up to 30% fraud reduction, according to industry benchmarks. The combination of network tokens and intelligent routing reportedly delivers authorization rate uplifts as high as 43% in optimized configurations.

For payment product teams, the implication is clear: the token strategy is no longer a compliance checkbox. It's an architectural decision that determines how much leverage you retain over your PSP relationships and how painful future migrations will be.

What This Means for the Stack

Payment orchestration is restructuring the payments stack in three ways that payment operators and product teams need to account for:

1. PSP commoditization accelerates

When an orchestration layer handles routing, failover, and tokenization, the PSP's role narrows to raw transaction processing. PSPs compete on authorization rates, geographic coverage, and cost per transaction — but the merchant relationship and data ownership shift upward to the orchestration layer. This compresses PSP margins over time, particularly for PSPs whose competitive moat was integration stickiness rather than processing quality.

2. Build vs. buy gets harder

Mid-market merchants face a genuine architectural decision. Building an internal orchestration layer provides maximum control but requires sustained engineering investment — routing logic, vault management, PCI compliance, PSP integration maintenance. Buying a platform is faster but introduces a new dependency. There's no universal right answer, but the decision should be driven by transaction volume (the optimization payoff needs to justify the cost), geographic complexity (single-region merchants rarely need orchestration), and team capacity (maintaining PSP integrations is ongoing work, not a one-time build).

3. The data layer matters more than the processing layer

Orchestration platforms accumulate cross-processor transaction data that no individual PSP has. They see which processors approve which card types at which rates in which geographies. This data is the foundation for intelligent routing, and it compounds in value over time — more transactions produce better routing models, which produce better approval rates, which attract more merchants.

This is the network effect that makes the orchestration layer strategically durable rather than a temporary middleware trend. The platforms that accumulate the most cross-processor data will build the most effective routing engines, and merchants will have a measurable economic reason to use them.

Structural Risks

The orchestration layer is not without structural risks:

• Latency — every additional layer in the transaction path adds processing time. For real-time payment flows, the routing decision overhead needs to be sub-50ms to avoid impacting checkout conversion.
• Single point of failure — replacing PSP dependency with orchestrator dependency doesn't eliminate concentration risk, it moves it. Merchants need to evaluate the orchestrator's uptime track record and failover architecture with the same rigor they'd apply to a PSP.
• Margin pressure on the orchestrators themselves — as PSPs build native orchestration features (Stripe Vault and Forward, Adyen's internal routing), independent platforms face compression from above. The long-term viability of independent orchestration depends on staying meaningfully ahead of PSP-native capabilities.
• Regulatory exposure — orchestrators handling token vaults and routing decisions are increasingly in scope for PSD2 (Europe), state money transmitter licensing (US), and data sovereignty requirements. Compliance costs will rise as regulators catch up to the architectural reality of where payment data now sits.

The Takeaway

Payment orchestration is not a feature. It's a structural layer that is becoming a permanent part of the enterprise payments stack, sitting between merchants and PSPs and absorbing functionality that used to be distributed across gateways, vaults, and internal routing logic.

For payment operators: the key decision is token vault ownership. The orchestration layer's strategic value is less about routing optimization (which PSPs will increasingly replicate) and more about who controls the payment credentials and the cross-processor transaction data. That's where the leverage sits.

For product teams building on top of the payments stack: design for PSP interchangeability from the start. Whether you build orchestration internally or buy it, the architectural principle is the same — your payment flow should not be structurally dependent on a single processor's proprietary token format. The merchants who are best positioned right now are the ones who made that decision two years ago.

Sources

• Research and Markets via GlobeNewsWire — Payment Orchestration Platform Market Report 2025, $6.1B by 2030 projection
• Mordor Intelligence — Payment Orchestration Platform Market Size & Growth, $2.65B (2025) to $6.23B (2030)
• Grand View Research — Payment Orchestration Platform Market Size Report
• TechCrunch — Primer raises $50M at $425M valuation (October 2021)
• Fintech Global — J.P. Morgan Payments joins Primer's platform (March 2025)
• Business of Payments — Primer revenue and profitability analysis (July 2024)
• TechCrunch — Gr4vy $15M Series A extension (January 2022)
• Scale Venture Partners — What Comes After Adyen and Stripe: The Future of Payments Orchestration
• FlyCode — PSPs Embrace Payment Orchestration, Stripe Vault and Forward API analysis
• Spreedly — Looking to 2025: The Shift from Payment Orchestration to Open Payment Platforms
• Payrails — Why Merchant-Owned Payment Vaults Outperform PSP Tokenization
• Very Good Security — PCI-Compliant Tokens vs. Network Tokens