What is Payments Orchestration?

Historically, the payment processing environment was more straightforward, but a widening array of customer payment options has made payments increasingly complex for businesses. Businesses cannot operate if they are unable to complete transactions. Quite simply, transactions with customers are integral to their success. The question then becomes, how can businesses best handle these payments?

From enterprise to local retail, more businesses are grappling with a payment experience that is complex, expensive, and burdensome to manage. Identifying the best payment solution for their needs is paramount to success and growth. The right payments partner can help businesses enhance the customer experience, lower costs, remove complexities, and scale efficiently.

What is the difference between payment orchestration and payment processing?

One key difference between payment orchestration and payment processing is that payment processing works with several entities to complete transactions, leaving businesses with a complicated and pieced-together collection of processing software and systems. Payments orchestration simplifies and streamlines payment processing by unifying various systems, including reconciliation, settlements, and reporting, under one flexible and efficient solution.

Payment Orchestration is More Than Processing

When a customer makes a purchase, a payment processor acts as the mediator between the merchant and the financial institutions involved. Payment processing involves several steps including generating the payment, sending payment authorization information to the cardholder’s bank, receiving a response from the issuing bank, and then relaying that response back to the payment originator. 

As merchants continue to add new technologies and components to their payment environment, they may find the overall system becoming less efficient. Payment orchestration aims to simplify the complex, managing the deployment and saving of your payments infrastructure in order to process payments in the most effective way, cutting costs, enhancing security, and helping businesses prepare for the future.

What is Payment Orchestration?

Payment orchestration is an agnostic payment solution that simplifies payment acceptance. With the combined power of switching, routing, and a robust payment gateway, payment orchestration helps merchants reduce the costs and resources required to manage payment systems while also shifting the management of payment complexity. 

As a payments orchestration provider, OLS can consolidate data across an ever-expanding set of payment types and channels, including a wide range of specialized payment services, all in a secure environment. Payment orchestration can reduce the work needed by IT teams to enable new payments and the effort to keep up with payment mandates related to PCI and compliance.

Payment orchestration from OLS provides businesses with many benefits, including security, continual availability, multiple payment channels, innovation, high transaction volume, and specialized routing.

• Security: Security of cardholder and sensitive data
• Continual Availability: Always on and engaged in heavy commerce activity
• Go To Market – Multiple Channels: Multiple distribution and promotional opportunities.
• Innovation: Adapting to and influencing the marketplace, offering new services and
• products, with improved speed to market for new features and payments
• High Transaction Volume: Total transaction values $100m+ and/or 25m+ transactions need to be supported
• Specialized Routing: Need for accommodating multiple payment methods and/or acquirers, effortless multi-processor functionality, and routing

Payments orchestration through OLS helps merchants connect to a broader range of acquirer and third-party service provider relationships, such as fraud detection, loyalty programs, delivery services, and data analytics platforms. We help merchants choose the best-in-class providers that add the most value to their enterprise. Additional functionality of a payment orchestration solution includes event logging, store and forward, and robust reporting. 

Payment Orchestration Versus Payment Processing

Although payment orchestration and payment processing are both solutions for credit and debit card payments, payment orchestration provides businesses with a more comprehensive, not to mention simplified and streamlined solution. Payment orchestration unifies payment flows and processes, such as reconciliation, settlements, and reporting, under one flexible and efficient solution.  

The OLS solution operates on every major platform and as a hosted solution. It can even operate with some components on-premise and others in the cloud. With OLS Payments as their payments orchestration partner, merchants can lower the overall cost of payments acceptance, accept more payment types, keep implementation and operational costs down, enhance transaction processing security, and reduce the impact of data breaches and compliance. These benefits allow merchants to remove complexities and provide a great customer experience.

Key Takeaways

• A payments orchestration partner helps merchants remove complexities, lower costs, and enhance the customer experience.
• Payment processing can leave businesses with a complicated and pieced-together collection of processing software and systems.
• Payments orchestration simplifies and streamlines payment processing by unifying various systems under one flexible and efficient solution.
• Payment orchestration provides businesses many benefits, including security, continual availability, and multiple payment channels.