Do You Actually Need a Payment Orchestrator?

Payment orchestration has become one of the most talked-about topics in merchant payments over the last three years. Orchestration vendors — Spreedly, Primer, Gr4vy, Apexx and others — have grown quickly, and the pitch is compelling: connect to multiple acquirers, route intelligently, improve approval rates, reduce costs, and never go down because one processor has an outage.

It's a genuinely powerful model. For the right merchant. The problem is that the sales narrative has outrun the reality of who actually benefits. Not every business needs an orchestration layer — and for some, adding one creates cost and complexity without meaningful return.

Here's how to think about it honestly.

What an Orchestrator Actually Does

A payment orchestrator sits between your checkout and your payment service providers (PSPs). It receives a payment request and decides — in real time — which PSP, processor or acquirer to route it to, based on rules you define: the card type, the geography, the amount, the transaction history, or any number of other signals.

More sophisticated orchestrators also handle retry logic (if one PSP declines, automatically retry with another), cascading (route first to your cheapest acquirer, fall back to a higher-acceptance one), tokenisation across multiple processors, and a unified reconciliation layer across all your payment relationships.

Who It's Right For

Orchestration typically delivers clear, measurable value in the following scenarios:

• High volume international merchants: If you're processing in multiple currencies across multiple markets, routing to locally-licensed acquirers can dramatically improve approval rates. A UK card processed through a European acquirer will have a different (often lower) acceptance rate than the same transaction routed to a UK acquirer.
• Businesses with meaningful card mix complexity: If you process a significant volume of premium, corporate, or commercial cards alongside standard consumer cards, routing different card types to different acquirers by cost can generate meaningful savings.
• Merchants who've outgrown a single PSP: If you're processing over £20M annually and still dependent on one acquirer, you have concentration risk and no negotiating leverage. Adding a second PSP with an orchestration layer solves both problems.
• Subscription businesses with high retry requirements: Orchestration's intelligent retry and updater services can recover a meaningful percentage of failed recurring payments — often 3–8% of transactions that would otherwise churn.

Who It Probably Isn't Right For

Orchestration also gets over-sold. It's worth being honest about when it doesn't make sense:

• Early-stage businesses under £5M processing volume: The fixed and variable costs of an orchestration layer — implementation, platform fees, ongoing maintenance — typically don't justify themselves below a certain volume threshold. A well-negotiated single-PSP agreement is a better use of time and money at this stage.
• Single-market businesses with a clean card mix: If you're processing predominantly UK consumer debit and credit cards with a single acquirer and good approval rates, the marginal improvement from adding routing complexity is often small.
• Businesses without in-house payments expertise: Orchestration gives you the infrastructure to route intelligently — but someone still has to design and maintain the routing logic. Without that internal capability, you risk paying for a sophisticated tool and using 10% of its potential.

Questions to Ask Any Orchestration Vendor

If you're evaluating orchestration platforms, these are the questions that tend to separate the marketing from the reality:

1. What is your pricing model — percentage of transaction value, monthly platform fee, or per-transaction? What does our total cost look like at our specific volume and transaction count?
2. How does your tokenisation work across PSPs, and what happens to our tokens if we leave?
3. Can you show us real approval rate data for merchants similar to us before and after implementation?
4. What does routing configuration look like — do we own it, do you manage it, or both?
5. What are your SLAs, and how have you performed against them in the last 12 months?

The Bottom Line

Orchestration is a genuine competitive advantage for the right business — and a costly distraction for the wrong one. The honest answer to "do we need an orchestrator?" depends entirely on your volume, card mix, geographic footprint, and internal capability to use the tools properly.

If you're considering it, the right first step is a payment audit: understand what your current approval rates, effective cost, and PSP performance actually look like. That gives you a credible baseline — and tells you whether the upside from orchestration is real or theoretical.