Merchants have always wanted the same fundamental thing from their payments technology: to get paid, quickly and at the lowest possible cost. Yet that narrow view of payments as a simple utility has long been overtaken by reality. Payments now sit at the intersection of customer experience, operational efficiency, and business growth. The challenge is that too many providers still design technology as though processing alone were enough.
Low fees matter, but they don’t tell the whole story. In an environment where margins are tight and corporate bankruptcies are at a fourteen-year high, merchants are scrutinising every cost – but they are also looking for value that extends beyond savings on interchange or acquirer fees. The right payments infrastructure can unlock new revenue streams, reduce false declines, and support international expansion. The wrong one, however, can stifle innovation, limit visibility, and frustrate both merchants and customers.
This is where much of the industry remains misaligned. For years, PSPs and acquirers have launched products driven by technical ambition rather than merchant need. The result has been a patchwork of partial solutions, bolted onto legacy systems that were never designed for today’s global digital economy. Merchants no longer accept that trade-off. They want transparency, control, and systems that can adapt as fast as their markets do.
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The most immediate demand merchants express is for higher acceptance rates and fewer false declines. Each declined transaction is a lost sale, but also a blow to customer trust. Many of these declines have little to do with fraud and everything to do with outdated risk models or rigid rule sets. With the right visibility and data-driven tools, these failures can be reduced dramatically.
Next is speed of integration. The payments landscape continues to fragment, with customers expecting to pay through account-to-account transfers, BNPL options, or emerging super-apps. Merchants want to be ready for these methods as soon as they gain traction, without waiting months for implementation. That agility depends on modern APIs and modular architecture – not monolithic platforms that require extensive rework every time a new method appears.
Cross-border capability is another critical pressure point. Merchants expanding into new markets don’t just want multi-currency acceptance. They need to navigate local schemes, regulations, and consumer preferences seamlessly. Simplified access to local payment methods, dynamic currency conversion, and integrated compliance tooling are no longer optional; they are prerequisites for efficient international growth.
Payment orchestration ties these priorities together. Most large merchants already work with multiple PSPs and acquirers. What they need is not another provider, but a smarter infrastructure layer that routes each transaction intelligently – choosing the fastest, cheapest, or most reliable option in real time. Done well, orchestration delivers immediate commercial benefits: reduced costs, higher authorisation rates, and improved resilience. Done poorly, it creates another layer of complexity and maintenance.
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If these solutions already exist in various forms, why aren’t they universally accessible? The core issue is not the lack of innovation at the feature level but the foundations those features rest upon. Many payment providers still rely on infrastructure built decades ago, patched over to meet modern demands. This architecture wasn’t designed for instant settlement, global routing, or data-driven optimisation. It was built for stability in a different era – and it shows.
To deliver what merchants now expect, the industry must move to cloud-native, API-first systems that prioritise visibility, scalability, and modularity. True flexibility doesn’t come from adding another feature to an old stack. It comes from rebuilding the base layer so that every function – from risk to reporting to reconciliation – can operate in real time and evolve as business needs change.
Modern infrastructure also brings transparency. Merchants can see where declines occur, why certain routes are more efficient, and how fees accumulate across networks. This data-driven insight enables smarter commercial decisions, tighter fraud management, and better forecasting. For PSPs, PayFacs, and acquirers, offering this clarity is no longer a competitive edge; it is a minimum requirement.
A new standard for payments
The future of payments lies in alignment – between what merchants genuinely need and what providers actually deliver. Merchants aren’t asking for complexity or novelty. They’re asking for systems that work as part of their wider business, not as a separate utility. That means higher acceptance rates, faster integration of new methods, seamless cross-border expansion, and infrastructure that can keep pace with digital transformation.
For providers, the task is to recognise that innovation starts at the foundation. Without modern infrastructure, every new feature will be another temporary fix on a legacy problem. With it, payments become what they should be: an enabler of growth, efficiency, and long-term value.
Robert Kraal, co-founder, Business Development, Silverflow
