Why Merchants Get Better Results When Their Payment Systems Work Together

Adding payment processors is relatively easy. Getting substantially better payment performance from the resulting network appears to be much harder.

That distinction stands out in “Connecting What’s Next: Open Infrastructure for the Future of Commerce,” the August/September 2026 edition of the Optimizing Payments Tracker® Series from PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal Open. Seventy-eight percent of companies with all five core orchestration capabilities reported payment processing completion gains of at least 2%, compared with just 7% of companies with only one or two capabilities.

The 71-percentage-point gap provides a different way to look at the merchant move toward multiple payment service providers. Merchants may add PSPs for redundancy, higher acceptance rates, competitive routing or access to local payment methods, but the report indicates that simply having more providers does not capture the potential processing benefit. The much stronger results appear among companies that can manage those providers as a coordinated network.

That makes payment orchestration maturity a practical issue rather than an infrastructure label. A merchant can have multiple processors available and still lack the ability to redirect transactions dynamically, update routing rules, move automatically to a backup provider or use credentials independently of a particular processor. Those gaps can limit how much value the merchant gets from having multiple connections in the first place.

The Payoff Appears at the System Level

The report does not establish that one orchestration capability is responsible for the performance difference. Its findings instead associate the strongest results with companies that have assembled the complete set.

That distinction matters. Dynamic routing can help determine where a transaction should be sent, but its usefulness depends partly on routing logic remaining current and on another processor being available when the preferred route fails. Similarly, adding processors does less to reduce dependence on individual providers if payment credentials remain tied to them.

The report’s discussion of vaulting and tokenization illustrates that connection. Centralized credential management can separate stored payment credentials from an individual provider, allowing merchants to retain continuity across their payment environment rather than maintaining separate credentials for each processor.

The same issue applies as merchants expand their payment mix. The report includes the ability to add payment methods without a major technical overhaul among the capabilities defining full orchestration. That gives merchants a way to extend the payments operation without repeatedly rebuilding the infrastructure supporting it.

The opportunity, then, lies in closing the gap between having pieces of orchestration and having enough of them working together to change payment outcomes. That gap remains substantial: The report says only a small fraction of companies have deployed all five capabilities.

For merchants already spending money on multiple processors, the finding raises a measurable question about those investments: whether the infrastructure is producing better completed-payment performance. The 78%-versus-7% divide suggests the answer depends heavily on how far the orchestration build has actually gone.

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