Vertical SaaS companies face a rapidly-evolving landscape when it comes to payment solutions. And it’s even further complicated by a lack of common understanding around industry terms like payment orchestration, and how the this term has changed over time. 

With many platforms looking to unlock additional revenue streams and scale their business—all while minimizing churn—FinTech provides the option for integrated financial services solutions like orchestration. 

But with varying definitions, outdated views, and our own unique approach that goes beyond payment orchestration, it can be difficult for software companies to know where to begin. In this article, we explain everything you need to know about payment orchestration and FinTech solutions beyond payments.

What is Payment Orchestration: What It Isn’t 

Originally, payment orchestration meant providing a merchant with the opportunity to consolidate transactions through a single middleware or API and then send transactions out to multiple endpoints. 

In other words, it was seen as a glorified payment gateway that would route transactions. By sending transactions to the appropriate destinations, it was possible to reduce the overall transaction cost, which meant that, over time, payment orchestration started to be seen as a method of cost optimization for routing. For many years, this understanding of payment orchestration sufficed—but not anymore. 

That’s because at Preczn, we believe the historical understanding of payment orchestration has constrained the perception of orchestration, which means financial technology professionals may not understand the full potential FinTech operating systems like Preczn offers.

So, What *is* Payment Orchestration?

So how do we at Preczn see payment orchestration? Essentially, it’s the process of streamlining, coordinating, and optimizing payment processing activities. In other words, if you’re a merchant accepting payments and you want to get optimal performance throughout the entire payments value chain—without needing to integrate to every point solution in the market and optimize performance yourself—that’s the pain point that payment orchestration can solve. 

Essentially, FinTech operation systems that utilize a purely orchestration-driven model can support both a multi-acquirer and PSP environment, routing transactions between both entities dynamically. 

While this is the most important capability today’s payment orchestration providers should offer vertical SaaS companies, there are additional elements worth highlighting. The platform should function as a single source of truth through which merchants using the operating platform can easily access connections in different countries and regions, as well as be able to accept alternative payment methods like card-not-present. 

And by implementing smart routing capabilities, the platform can (re-)route payments dynamically across various networks or acquirers to increase performance. While not all payment orchestration platforms will offer all these features, a pure orchestration provider must support a multi-PSP setup to differentiate itself from payment processors. 

Say you’re a merchant that wants to use multiple PSPs or acquirers in the same region to determine which performs better than the other. This might be the case if you’re a smaller merchant that’s outgrowing your current provider, but may not have the funding to upgrade to an enterprise-level payment program. 

Previously, merchants would either need to settle for a single payment processor, or have their software team build and maintain all the necessary integrations to both. Then, their operations team would need to monitor and determine which integrations performed best and manually handle routing optimization—a significant effort of which it could be difficult to justify its ROI. For smaller companies, they might not have the resources to commit to this; even for those who do, it’s not the most efficient use of their time, or they may not have enough buy-in from upper management.

In other words, connecting to an orchestration layer translates to an automated payment ops team of sorts for merchants like these: it’s possible to go live with any PSP or risk provider that’s connected to the central platform, all without any additional underwriting needed.

From Payment Orchestration to Platform Orchestration: The Preczn Approach

At Preczn, our FinTech operating system is operator-first, which means we bring customers, providers, services, and data all under one roof. Like other payment orchestration platforms, Preczn offers payment optionality through a centralized vault, but we take it a step further than only storing payment metadata like Apple Pay, ACH, or credit card data, bringing it to what could essentially be labeled as “platform orchestration.” 

This means we also store merchant data in our vault, allowing merchants to seamlessly partner with as many payment processors as needed to manage their financial services. We’re capable of flawlessly managing an entire portfolio of thousands of merchants, empowering vertical SaaS organizations to flexibly move merchants from one provider to the next. Through our AI-driven merchant management platform platform, we can centralize all merchant data and leverage it to establish new underwriting relationships with FinTech partners, wherever that may be.

Essentially, Preczn goes far beyond mere payment routing or processing; instead, payment is only one component in the FinTech services we offer. Through our platform orchestration approach, it’s possible to not only centralize and support multi-PSP payment ecosystems, but also lending and treasury, offering a truly embedded finance approach that allows you to scale your success.

Equally important is that we ensure our users can securely manage their payments and operations. By ensuring PCI compliance, SaaS companies can rest easy knowing that all sensitive payment and cardholder data is securely processed, transmitted, and stored.

Conclusion

The FinTech payments ecosystem is a complex and vast field, and this article only scratched the surface of it. Preczn’s aim is to enable SaaS companies to unlock new revenue streams by integrating FinTech approaches that go beyond not only payment processing, but even traditional payment orchestration. Through our innovative platform orchestration approach, Preczn embeds Fintech solutions to centralize the managing of merchant portfolios, unifying disparate PSPs and acquirers under one platform--paving the way for the new standard in financial technology.

If you want to discover how our FinTech operating system can work for you beyond payments, contact Preczn today and learn more about our integrated financial services solutions