Embracing Open Payments: The Future of Payment Orchestration
After several challenging years of low growth and high inflation, we are finally witnessing a return to a growth mindset. Operational excellence remains crucial for continued survival, especially in the payments space — but how can this excellence be achieved today?
Recently, Spreedly’s President, Peter Dougherty, discussed how corporate mindsets are shifting back to growth.
Payments are at the core of growth, as an optimized payment system can significantly impact a business’s financial stability and management. While payment orchestration has been a disruptive force in the industry, it too must evolve to keep pace with changing technological capabilities.
The rise of Open Banking in the UK and EU has sparked new conversations on the future of payments and payment orchestration, as the ability to share information with payment service providers becomes increasingly flexible in the eyes of regulators.
Revitalizing Growth Strategies with Open Banking Payments
For companies resuming international operations, opening lines of business in a new country can be an essential first step. To do so, however, you need to know a few key pieces of information, such as the banking and fraud rules in a given region.
If your last venture into international waters was several years ago, Open Banking may not have even been on the scene yet. As you shift your focus from cost containment back to financial expansion, you need to consider how Open Banking payments have impacted the payment space as a whole.
Determining the optimal payment methods for both your target customers and local suppliers and vendors within a specific area is vital to becoming an established business in a new location.
As Peter puts it, facing the reality of Open Banking is really about being prepared for the unknownand figuring out the best path to getting to market quickly.
Leveraging Data Access for Enhanced Growth
So, Open Banking is the new normal, but how exactly does it support your business’s growth? It all comes down to data sharing.
Access to data from customers and other businesses can give you a more precise picture of your diverse target audience. In the U.S., for example, consumers may be more eager to engage with merchants offering deals in the wake of ongoing interest hikes and financial hardship. Customers are looking for the path of least resistance that can also offer the greatest return, be it lower fees or heightened efficiency.
When attracting customers to your payment experience, one crucial factor to monitor amidst technological advancements is fraud. A decrease in fraud can lead to lower prices for customers, driving customer loyalty while also helping you achieve your growth goals.
Optimizing your payment mix can also play an important role in attracting customers in new regions. To win as much business as possible, Peter reveals that businesses must provide a “diverse set of payment methods” and ensure they can enter new markets without being tied solely to a single vendor.
Speaking from the point of view of a business owner, Peter says: “I want to have options. I want to be able to leverage the openness of a payments platform freely to be able to make the choices to build that best-of-breed payment stack to win in these new markets, to let me continue to grow.”
This thought process applies not just to new markets but to markets where your business is already established as well. What matters most is leveraging an open payments platform that gives you the “option to make the best choices without being tied to legacy integrations or contracts," Peter says.
Understanding the Concept of an Open Payments Platform
Open payments represent the natural evolution of payment orchestration as it becomes more integrated with Open Banking technologies. An open payments platform, like Spreedly, acts as a digital meeting place between the payment orchestration strategy and Open Banking capabilities.
As Spreedly itself adapts to the open payments approach, Peter notes the importance of being able to work with a diverse selection of brands and payment service providers:
“I think what’s exciting about our world as an open payments platform is we have that openness, that inclusiveness to work with the best brands in the world, the best technology companies in the world to provide a ton of value to our merchants.”
Rather than being the product itself, payment orchestration is now becoming a facet of the broader open payments approach. Payment orchestration provides you with the technical infrastructure necessary to streamline tasks like payment vaulting and fraud prevention.
With your system optimized via payment orchestration, an open payment platform can take things a step further by providing the optimal environment for you to collaborate with specific payment service providers in new regions. Payment performance has become a fundamentally important piece of any merchant’s value proposition, making it vital to embrace open payments and the advantages they offer. “Success and failures happen in a fraction of a section.”
A simple percentage point difference in your approval rate can be the deciding factor of whether your business soars to victory or crashes to defeat. These days, it’s no longer enough to incorporate payment orchestration within a legacy payment system — you must consider how to implement a comprehensive open payment solution from the very start of your growth strategy.
About Spreedly
Spreedly's Payments Orchestration platform enables and optimizes digital transactions with the world’s most complete payment services marketplace. Built on Spreedly’s PCI-compliant architecture, our Advanced Vault solution combines a modern feature-set with rule-based configurations to optimize the vaulting experience for all stored payment methods. Global enterprises and hyper-growth companies grow their digital business faster by relying on our payments platform. Hundreds of customers worldwide secure card data in our PCI-compliant vault and use tokenized card data to enable and optimize over $45 billion of annual transaction volumes with any payment service. Spreedly is headquartered in downtown Durham, NC.
