A recent study found that 98% of software companies say they would switch payment providers if it were easy. Almost none do. That gap between intent and action proves this isn’t a case of preference or vendor dissatisfaction. It’s about architecture.
Across industries, platforms are moving away from fragmented bolt-on financial services and towards integrated models with embedded payments, one of the biggest revenue engines inside modern software platforms. They’re sticky, scalable, highly monetised, and operationally critical. But the deeper payments get embedded, the harder they are to change.
Thus organisations remain status quo. Not because they want to, but because moving feels like pulling a thread that could unravel half the system. The result is a paradox: the very systems designed to enable growth are now limiting it.
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Why payment infrastructure becomes “sticky”
Payments never sit in one place. They run through checkout, billing, onboarding, reconciliation, reporting, and compliance. Before long, these connections become tightly entangled.
Changing providers is rarely a simple swap and replace. It’s a complete rebuild of financial workflows: rewriting integrations, reconfiguring APIs, and re-certifying compliance. For platforms managing thousands of merchants, even minor disruptions like a settlement delay or a reporting inconsistency can knock into revenue impact.
Beyond the technical layer, there is economic gravity. Many payment relationships are structured around revenue share, bundled financial services, and long-term contracts. The provider is part of the deeper business model.
Even when better options exist, the cost of switching feels higher than the price of staying put.
The hidden cost of staying locked in
What often gets underestimated is the cost of not moving. Without flexibility, businesses are locked into one processor’s pricing, fee structures, and performance profile. Costs that could be optimised become fixed, often translating into double-digit inefficiencies at scale.
Approval rates and another invisible drag. Payment providers perform differently across geographies, card types, and transaction profiles. Without routing options, platforms absorb avoidable declines, typically in the range of 15%. At scale, that’s not marginal loss — it’s millions.
Operationally, the load intensifies. Disconnected systems create manual reconciliation, exception handling, and workarounds that slow financial close. Teams end up managing payments instead of optimising them, often consuming around 30% more operational effort than necessary.
Rethinking the model: The shift toward commerce orchestration
What’s changing now is not just the providers, but the model itself. Most companies know their current setup isn’t fit for purpose. 84% have recently invested in payment infrastructure, expecting better reconciliation, revenue capture, and visibility, and 62% prefer to work with multiple providers.
Instead of embedding a single provider deep into the stack, more companies are stepping back and introducing an orchestration layer that sits between their business logic and financial partners. This decouples workflows from any one provider and creates optionality where none existed. Businesses can work with multiple processors, route transactions dynamically, and optimise for cost, approval rates, or geography in real time, without rebuilding their systems.
This isn’t about switching providers. It’s about removing the need to “switch” in the first place.
The quantifiable benefits of flexible commerce infrastructure
When payments become flexible, the benefits show up quickly and measurably.
Costs come down: intelligent routing across multiple providers can reduce processing fees by up to 23%. Revenue goes up: optimised routing can improve authorisation rates by 5-15%, recovering revenue that would otherwise be lost. Operationally, things get lighter: centralised infrastructure reduces reconciliation effort by 30% and speeds up financial close.
For CFOs, this is not just a technical upgrade. It is a financial lever. Individually, these gains are meaningful. Together, they translate to millions of dollars in annual value for high-volume platforms.
The future of optionality
If 98% of companies say they would switch providers, the problem isn’t reluctance. It’s a constraint.
The next generation of commerce platforms won’t be defined by which provider they chose five years ago. They will be defined by how easily they can change providers tomorrow. Payments are no longer just transactions. They’re part of a broader financial workflow that must be flexible, interoperable, and continuously optimisable.
The organisations that recognise this shift early will not just reduce costs. They’ll build infrastructure that can evolve with their business, without requiring reinvention every time the market changes.
That is the real opportunity.
Kevin Kidd, Founder and CEO, Cresora Commerce
