The Five Gaps Sabotaging Your Tech Stack (And How to Fix Them)

Buying something online is incredibly simple for the average consumer. They find the product, put it in the cart, pay, and wait for it to arrive. What they don’t see is the astoundingly complex ecosystem behind the scenes of their payment. You are no longer just collecting money, you are the manager of a labyrinth of security standards, international regulations, and evolving fraud schemes. This payments tech stack, the collection of tools and services you use to handle these transactions, is at the very core of your ability to grow.

The unfortunate reality for many businesses is that their payments stack is less of an asset and more of a liability. In conversations with industry leaders, five key gaps consistently surface as the biggest threats to revenue.
We’re going to look at the five biggest payments challenges and give you a clear path to turning your payment stack from a cost center into a strategic advantage that drives your company’s growth. Let’s get started.

You lack flexibility and geographical coverage

Your current payments setup may restrict your ability to adapt to new business models or expand internationally. This gap occurs when your system is not equipped to handle a wide variety of currencies, local payment methods, or regional requirements. Your business operates in a world where commerce has no borders, but that expansion creates obstacles that can tie up an outdated tech stack.

For example, what works in the United States does not work in Germany or China, where mobile wallets and bank transfers dominate. More than half of all online shoppers have purchased from an overseas retailer, and the value of these cross-border transactions was somewhere around $2 trillion in 2024. If your payment stack is not equipped for these local preferences, you are leaving money on the table.

To resolve this, start by adopting a vendor-agnostic payments orchestration platform. You need a payment processor that acts as a translator for global commerce. This platform hast to support multiple currencies and, crucially, Local Payment Methods (LPMs), such as the local digital wallet or bank transfer scheme, which process the majority of e-commerce volume in many regions.

Connecting to a whole host of payment gateways and local payment methods through a single integration turns your complex knot of connections into a single, simplified, centralized hub. You’ll be able to maximize customer reach and revenue capture across every new market you enter.

Your transaction decline rates are too high

Failed transactions happen for a bunch of different reasons, including soft declines, expired cards, or network errors. These cause involuntary churn: losing customers not because they canceled, but because a payment failed. Every one of these soft declines is often a temporary problem, not a definitive failure, but most payment systems tend to just give up.

A strong payments tech stack needs to be able to address and overcome these issues. The entire calculation for lost revenue proves that by failing to recover a single payment, you lose the potential for all future payments from that customer, resulting in massive revenue loss when scaled up.

Investing in automated recovery tools is a revenue-retention mandate, not an optional expense.

You can get on the road to recovery from this issue with a system that has intelligent payment retries. For recoverable soft declines (like insufficient funds or temporary network errors), you can build a system to automatically retry the transaction.

First, resubmit the transaction to the same gateway after a short, randomized delay. If that fails, automatically route the transaction to a different, high performing gateway. This sophisticated and elegant logic can recapture five-to-15% of your otherwise lost revenue.

You can also implement intelligent payment routing to direct a transaction to the processor known for the highest authorization rates in that specific context. This optimization happens instantly and can easily gain you one-to-three percentage points in approvals.

Your fraud management is ineffective

Your payments stack is going to need robust and adaptable fraud controls. A lot of merchants are using built-in fraud prevention that is not sophisticated enough to handle complex issues or is difficult to fine-tune to your specific needs.

The financial cost of fraud is staggering. For every one dollar in fraudulent transactions, a merchant loses between three and four dollars in lost goods, fees, and administrative time. An overly aggressive fraud system, however, is just as costly as fraud itself because it declines legitimate, high value customers.

To achieve the perfect balance between security and conversion, you’re going to need an orchestrated fraud layer that allows for customizable tools.

Start by implementing a step up authentication strategy. Instead of immediately declining a suspicious but not definitive transaction, route it to an extra verification step, like 3DS2.

This shifts the liability away from you and onto the issuing bank while allowing the legitimate customer to prove their identity and complete the purchase. Once you’ve done that, make sure that you can dynamically loosen your fraud scoring rules for known, high trust customers or returning visitors.

Your data is immobile

Having your data tied to one payment service provider presents a massive set of problems. It’s challenging to switch providers, add new partners, or innovate without facing the major hurdle of migrating all your payment data. This is what’s known as "soft lock-in," which can be perceived to be just as powerful as a contractual obligation. Also, the security and cost implications of a payment migration are serious. For example, 37% of companies cited "inconsistent API performance" as a key barrier to successful system migration.

The most valuable technical component in a modern payments stack is tokenization within a vault. You need a single, vendor-neutral layer that separates your business from the specific APIs of each PSP.

You’ll need a vault that can store and manage tokens from multiple gateways and networks, guaranteeing portability so you are never locked to one processor. If you need to switch PSPs for better rates, higher authorization rates, or improved fraud features, the core logic of your application doesn't have to change. All you have to do is update the routing rules within your orchestration layer.

Your costs are high and performance is low

Digital commerce is dependent upon a system that is optimized for both speed and cost.

You’re competing on your ability to process a transaction seamlessly and securely. Your payment stack determines your authorization rates, your fraud losses, your compliance costs, and your ability to enter new markets.

The solution here is simple: find an open payments platform that gives you the freedom to choose the best tool for every job.

You should be able to connect to the top providers for advanced fraud detection, different regional gateways for better authorization rates, and specific local payment methods, all through a single point of integration. This platform should not only optimize the path a transaction takes but also provides open access to the wealth of data and tools that support your entire organization, including finance, operations, and support teams. This is about unlocking the full value of your payments data and technology.

Mastering your payments tech stack is non-negotiable

A modern payments tech stack is a business-critical asset. By strategically leveraging an open payments performance platform, you move from merely processing payments to using them to power your growth.

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.