Five Questions to Ask Before You Add Your Next Payment Provider
For most enterprise merchants, provider selection is no longer a single decision taken once every five years. It is a recurring one, made under time pressure, about an estate that already contains several providers.
The research that PaymentGenes Consultancy conducted in H1 2026 with nearly 60 enterprise merchants puts numbers on the shift. 84% are considering adding or switching providers within 24 months, and 55% already run multiple PSPs by design. More than 80% have moved beyond the single-provider model or are actively moving beyond it. The question has changed from which provider to use, to which provider does what, and whether the organisation can run what it builds.
The same research shows a consistent gap between what merchants buy and what they switch on. These five questions come out of that gap. They are worth working through before a selection process starts, not after a contract is signed.
1. What specific mechanism will this provider deliver, and when does it go live?
Merchants name cost optimisation (76%), performance optimisation (74%), resilience and redundancy (69%) as the reasons they build a multi-provider stack. Set that against implementation. Lowest-cost routing, the most direct mechanism for turning a multi-acquirer setup into savings, is live at only 12% of merchants, with 38% still at the planning stage. Authorisation forwarding, which recovers declined volume by re-presenting to a second acquirer, is live at 7%, and 60% have not considered it.
Without active routing capabilities, a second PSP acquirer delivers redundancy, negotiating leverage, an additional settlement stream and a second integration to maintain. Those are real returns, but they are not the returns most business cases were approved on, and the gap tends to surface at the first post-implementation review.
What to ask: when routing logic goes live, what it costs to build and maintain, and who writes and maintains the rules. Then establish internally what a basis point of savings or increase in authorisation rates is worth to you, so the answer can be evaluated rather than accepted.
2. Who holds your credentials, and what would moving them cost?
Merchants name integration complexity (83%), internal resourcing (66%) and business disruption risk (57%) as the reasons they do not act on switching intent. Token and data migration is cited separately by 26%.
Tokenisation is where those barriers get built. 52% of merchants run PSP-level tokenisation against 36% on network tokenisation, which means most enterprise card credentials still sit in a provider-controlled vault. Every credential added to that vault is a future migration cost. The longer the relationship runs, the larger the vault, and the more expensive the exit becomes. Token migration is possible but requires a strong collaboration with the sending and receiving PSP in the process.
Network tokenisation, a portable vault, or a PCI-compliant token service that sits outside any single provider are the mechanisms that make flexibility structural rather than nominal. A stack designed for flexibility on top of provider-held credentials is flexible only until it is tested.
What to ask: where credentials will sit, who owns them, and what a migration would involve in practice. That number, not the contract term, is the real switching barrier.
3. Can your team operate what you are buying?
48% of merchants run the entire payments estate with fewer than five dedicated FTEs, and a further 4% have no dedicated resource at all. Ownership is split between product or technology (29%) and finance (29%), with operations at 17% and a standalone payments function at 15%.
Against that sits a three-year investment agenda: performance optimisation (66%), new payment methods (64%), payments analytics (53%), orchestration (45%) and fraud and risk (45%). Five parallel priorities, carried by the same small team that runs the estate day to day.
Every capability on that list converts into an operating requirement the moment it is bought. Routing rules need building, testing and maintaining. Authorisation forwarding needs decline-code analysis. Network tokenisation is a migration project. Reconciliation tooling needs configuring against every provider in the stack.
What to ask: which layers will actually go live in year one, and what impact the provider absorbs on your behalf. Implementation effort is a competitive variable. Treat headcount and sequencing as part of the architecture decision rather than a consequence of it.
4. Where does the reconciliation work land?
Centralised reconciliation tooling is live at 26% of merchants, in progress at 19%, planned at 26%, and not considered at 29%. It is consistently the layer sequenced last.
That ordering has a cost. Diversification without a reconciliation layer does not remove complexity, it transfers it from the front end to the back office, where it lands as manual effort in finance. The cost does not disappear, it changes department, and it does not scale with volume.
This is probably the most overlooked capability that could drive efficiency and control in the back office. A key enabler for growth and cost-effectiveness.
What to ask: what settlement and reporting outputs look like alongside the systems you already run, and what reconciling across providers will require. Put that work in the same business case as the provider addition, not the one after it.
5. Are you measuring providers on delivered outcomes or on signed terms?
Merchants accept more than five payment method categories on average but name only three as strategically important. International cards hold up at 95% accepted and 78% named important, and digital wallets at 83% and 66%. PayPal is accepted by 74% and named important by 19%. BNPL is accepted by 64% and named by 12%.
Account-to-account and open banking sit between those poles, accepted by 52% and named strategically important by 29%. They are also the category most likely to move. A2A and open banking rank at 33% on the three-year investment list, above multi-acquiring at 31%. In Europe that intent now has a concrete object. Wero, the scheme run by the European Payments Initiative, moved from peer-to-peer into e-commerce across Germany, Belgium, France and Luxembourg between late 2025 and 2026, with the Netherlands scheduled and in-store acceptance live in Belgium. For merchants in those markets, A2A stops being a strategic abstraction and becomes a specific acceptance decision with its own integration, refund flow, dispute profile and reconciliation cost.
That is where the gap between acceptance and conviction gets created. Part of the spread above is an artefact of a ranked question, but the direction is consistent. Acceptance decisions are taken once and reviewed rarely, while every method carries integration, reconciliation, dispute handling and monitoring cost. A new scheme earns a place when it moves authorisation, cost or reach in a market that matters to you, and it should be declined when it does not. The same discipline applies to providers.
What to do: instrument authorisation rates, incident response and settlement accuracy per provider from the start and run a method-level review annually. A provider that is not measured cannot be managed, and a long tail of methods is where unexamined cost accumulates.
Sequencing beats shopping
The technology question is largely settled. Orchestration, tokenisation, multi-acquiring and routing are all commercially available, and the adoption figures show merchants buying them. What separates merchants now is whether they can operate what they have bought.
That makes provider selection a sequencing exercise as much as a procurement one. Map the estate end to end before adding the next layer. Name the mechanism the addition is meant to deliver and the date it goes live. Confirm the team has the capacity to switch it on. Flexibility is something an organisation operates, not something it buys.
Sources
All figures cited are drawn from "Merchants Are Going Shopping: Why the Single-PSP Era Is Ending" (PaymentGenes Consultancy, 2026), a survey of 58 enterprise merchants on payment architecture, provider strategy and investment priorities, and from its companion report on PSP switching intent. The full findings, including the underlying charts, are available at the link above.
Wero rollout status is drawn from the European Payments Initiative, the scheme operator, and from its market announcements for Germany (e-commerce live November 2025), Belgium (March 2026), France (April 2026) and Luxembourg (September 2026). Status as of October 2026.
About PaymentGenes
PaymentGenes is an independent payments and fintech specialist working with merchants, providers and investors across consultancy, recruitment, education and M&A. PaymentGenes Consultancy advises enterprise merchants on payment strategy, provider selection and operating model design.
Contact Us
Ward Hagenaar, Managing Partner, Co-Founder
PaymentGenes Consultancy, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
ward@paymentgenes.com | www.paymentgenes.com
About the authors
Ward Hagenaar is Managing Partner at PaymentGenes Consultancy, where he advises enterprise merchants and payment providers on payment strategy and provider selection.
Michal Rozynek is Merchant Services Lead at PaymentGenes Consultancy and leads the Merchants Pulse research programme.
