Payment orchestration study finds risks in partial tech adoption
PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly found companies with partial orchestration stacks often trail peers with complete payment systems.
By Rafael Ortiz · Fintech Correspondent
· 3 min read
A payment orchestration study from PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly found that companies midway through payments modernization can perform worse on some measures than firms with fewer tools in place. The July edition of the Orchestration Advantage Series surveyed 110 U.S. companies with at least $10 million in annual revenue and found a sharp performance gap between partial and complete adoption.
The report examined five capabilities: automated dynamic routing, frequent changes to routing logic, failover and redundancy, internal control over payment tokens, and connectivity to multiple payment service providers. Companies using all five reported stronger results than those with one or two, while firms with three or four capabilities often showed weaker outcomes than expected.
What does the payment orchestration study show?
PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly reported that 78% of companies using all five orchestration capabilities saw transaction-completion gains of at least 2%. Among companies with one or two capabilities, 7% reached that level. Among companies with three or four, the share was 10%.
The findings indicate that adding payment technology in stages does not produce a steady rise in performance for every company. The report points to a middle phase in which firms have introduced more systems, rules and vendor connections, while their operating model may not yet be mature enough to capture the full benefit.
Customer experience measures also showed strain among partial adopters. According to the study, 52% of companies with three or four capabilities said payment problems accounted for at least 5% of customer complaints. The same group also reported higher checkout abandonment, according to PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly, though the report summary did not give a specific percentage for that measure.
What is payment orchestration?
Payment orchestration is the coordination layer that helps merchants manage processors, routing rules, payment tokens, retries and backup paths. In practice, it can route a transaction to different providers, apply updated processing rules, and maintain continuity if one connection fails.
The study’s results suggest that orchestration has value when the underlying components work together. A company that adds more payment functions without unified controls may also add reconciliation tasks, duplicated processes, brittle integrations and overlapping vendor arrangements, according to the report’s discussion of technical debt in enterprise transformation.
Companies with complete stacks reported higher conversion and approval outcomes. PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly found that firms using all five capabilities were 11 times as likely as those with one or two to report checkout-conversion gains of at least 2%.
The approval-rate gap was also wide. Sixty-nine percent of full-stack adopters reported payment approval rates above 97%, compared with 32% of the least mature companies, according to the study.
The report frames the issue as one of integration rather than the value of any single tool. The strongest outcomes appeared among companies that had combined routing, token control, failover and provider connectivity into a more complete payment operating system.
For operators, the findings show why payments upgrades can create a temporary burden before they produce measurable gains. The study does not argue against modernization, but it indicates that partial adoption can leave businesses with added complexity and limited improvement until governance, systems and workflows catch up.
This story draws on original reporting from PYMNTS.
